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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

This is a great point. I'm a working programmer and journalist...In the latter profession, there is no greater, clear-cut sin than making things up. The second is to not plagiarize...but what constitutes plagiarism can differ among different opinion-holders.

I can't think of a ethical parallel in programming. I mean, there's copying of proprietary code but that's also a criminal violation. Plagiarism and fabrication can be done without incurring criminal charges, but it's basically the end of a career in journalism.

The point is that even though these transgressions seem minor in quantity, for a professional journalist to have justified committing them requires either a total burst of sudden professional insanity...or a long, undiscovered history of other transgressions.

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I would argue that passing insecure systems off as secure, like what we saw with Tesco today, would count as unethical. That's a case where you can cut corners and nobody might notice for a while, and the system in question seemingly works.

Yes, I agree that would be unethical and should be a career-killer. But that's a decision arguably made possible by several layers of incompetent management, not just one manager or coder. Higher-level managers can say that they aren't expected to know of the technical details. And coders can blame the result on legacy systems that they had to interact with. The buck does not stop as cleanly at one person as it does in the case of the writer who plagiarizes/fabricates.

Moreover, journalistic writing is very public. Your byline is attached to a piece that was seen by at least a few hundred, if not hundreds of thousands of people. If you get called out on fabrication/plagiarism, well, people are going to know about it. Editors and proofreaders rarely get called out by name for mistakes. But that's irrelevant, since an editor/proofreader isn't really in the position to fabricate/plagiarize in a writer's piece...they're there to edit/fix/separate-the-chaff-from-the-wheat-and-keep-the-chaff

"The point is that even though these transgressions seem minor in quantity, for a professional journalist to have justified committing them requires either a total burst of sudden professional insanity...or a long, undiscovered history of other transgressions." <<+100 -- as a journalist, i think this is the most insightful comment on this thread. I suspect even more will come out.

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