Stories about the minister who plagiarised

As part of our fact-finding and journalistic research assignments on Wednesday, I asked the participants to search for information about the former German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (in picture by Bild magazine), who just last week resigned because of revelations that he had been plagiarizing major parts of his university doctorate thesis.

My point was of course to show to the editors that plagiarism is clearly not allowed and copy-pasting usually makes a bad story instead of explaining things in your own words. Part of the job of the editors should be to easily notice and weed out direct copying done by their reporters.

Here’s a link to the story by Edward Kinabo, subeditor of Tanzania Daima. And here’s the text by Deogratias Mushi, features editor at Daily News.

Both also comment on the debate that has followed in Tanzania where people have been surprised to hear that in Europe a minister resigns because of plagiarizing his PhD thesis, while here in Tanzania ministers can still remain in office even after outright corruption charges.

By simply googling for zu guttenberg plagiarism one can easily find several good sources which provide additional information about the extent of the German minister’s plagiarism.

From Wikipedia we can find out that the topic of the thesis was about the development of constitutional law in USA and the European Union.

A BBC report says that more than half of the 475-page thesis had long sections lifted from other people’s work. A passage from a newspaper article was copied word for word without attribution, as well as another paragraph from a US embassy website.

The British Guardian estimates that as much as five percent of the PhD thesis was copied directly from other books and websites without giving credit to the original sources.

The German weekly Der Spiegel published on its website a revealing visualization of the copy-pasting, comparing passages from the thesis to passages from the obvious sources which were never given credit. By dragging a tool on the website, one can see that whole chunks of text have been copied with just one word being modified.

In Germany, a website was created to allow the audience to post their findings of plagiarism in the thesis. At GuttenPlag Wiki you can also find an interesting graphic showing in colours whether a page in the book included plagiarized parts. The black parts in the image below indicate pages that include plagiarism, the red lines stand for pages plagiarizing several different sources, and the white lines are clean. The light blue pages refer to the lists of content and references.






Baron zu Guttenberg’s thesis was previously also available at the Amazon online bookshop, but now it seems to be out of stock.