The Issue of Plagiarism in Mass Media

High school might be the first time you get a real taste of what it means to cheat and why should not do so in terms of our education. Through college, we continue to learn to be extremely careful about how we reference source material and how we credit those sources. The Zakaria issue suggests, however, that there is some form of disconnect between what we learn during our undergraduate or possibly even our graduate academic careers that is permissive in how much we appropriately credit our borrowed phrasing.

Perhaps rather than focusing on plagiarism as much, however, somewhere people are losing the ability to express their own thoughts either in reaction to material or as building upon their research. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of dishonesty as we have so many people in our country who do not wish to think for themselves. It's difficult not to be dismayed at the thought that mass media, for all its positives, has created an environment where the anti-intellectual nature of our country has done more to shape how some professional writers craft their works than the desire to inform, entertain, and improve. Can we realistically consider journalists in this era of "new media" to be professional writers at all?