Today’s editions of our Wheeling “newspapers” include another column from West Virginia University’s Carrie White. The column, “Finding Contentment,” can be found on page 5 of both papers.

Since I discovered plagiarism in two columns by White last year (see here and here), I decided to do a quick search. It didn’t take long to discover that two-thirds of Professor White’s column is plagiarized from another source.

A third of the way into the column, White asks us to think about how we can make the “contentment choice.” Except for the final sentence, the rest of her article (starting with the 6th paragraph) is word-for-word from another source. (In searching for the original, I noticed that White is not the first to plagiarize this material. Dates are not always present, but this column from 2012 appears to be one of the earlier versions.)

Interestingly, in doing my search I discovered that this is not the first time that the Wheeling papers have run this plagiarized column from Ms. White. Here is the same column from October 27, 2019. It’s headline, however, was different:

Finding Contentment Withing Our Present Selves Is Important

(Good news, I guess – today’s version did drop the misspelling.)

As I’ve asked previously: how long would it take to run columns like this through a plagiarism checker? (I’ve done it – it’s under a minute.) Why should they, however? It takes up space in the paper and that’s all that matters.

What a great newspaper!