So it turns out our Jacques got his Nikita scoop from this website – tsk, tsk, no attribution
Photograph of a Maltese Prick having a drink at the French Cock - picture credit: Jacques's old blog
Jacques Rene Zammit is one of those people who monitor this website obsessively – even more obsessively than I do, as it turns out – while dedicating quite a bit of time to denigrating it and me on his own blog.
It really was too much of a coincidence that he should ‘discover’ Miss Nikita’s plagiarism of Gillian Tett immediately after my own blog-post about her poor writing, and the comments which flowed in beneath.
Now it turns out that he DIDN’T discover Miss Nikita’s plagiarism. He simply swiped the comparison between the two articles from a comment posted on this website a full day before he uploaded his own revelation. And he let his readers think that he’d made the discovery himself.
This comment was posted here by Delacroixet on Thursday.
Please compare:
Nikita Alamango: Global markets – a ‘toxic’ cocktail, Times of Malta
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110810/blogs/global-markets-a-toxic-cocktail.379648
Euro Zone Crisis Resembles US Turmoil in 2008, Financial Times via CNBC.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44029584/Euro_Zone_Crisis_Resembles_US_Turmoil_in_2008
Damn shame I spent Thursday uploading comments on the hoof while barely glancing at them between meetings. But it’s an even bigger shame that Jacques Rene Zammit filched the information and pretended he’d made the discovery himself, largely because – eaten up with envy as he is – he probably can’t bear to give this website credit for anything at all.
Imbasta jghid dwar Nikita.
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Nikita’s Facebook wall makes some hilarious reading at the moment, believe me. Here’s a little… taster:
Mark Camilleri
Nipretendi li wara li nqbadt tipplagjarizza, ghal-gieh il-Partit tirrezenja minn kull kariga ufficjali li ghandek. Grazzi
…
Nikita Alamango
Kont nippretendi li int, min daqs ta nies tifhem l ipokrezija li hawn Malta. If you read carefully I paraphrased and that is not copy and paste. Missek drajt kif jahdmu Malta – l istampa cara hafna ghal min jsegwini u jaf li verita kollha ghaliex gara li gara. Ghalhekk mhux talli ma nirrezenjax talli se nkompli nahdem f dak li nemmen u hadd mhu se jalaqli halqi – qatt! Misni hadd ghal media fil kaz tieghek heh – Grazzi tas support Mark ! Napprezza !
Andre’ Vella
To be honest, to paraphrase you need to quote the source….and you never did for the FT. Hence why they removed your blog from ToM…
Nikita Alamango
andre – it on TOM for 3 days before they removed it . Had it been for that reason they would have never published it.
Mark Camilleri
’Rephrasing’ xorta plagjarizmu jibqa’ u xorta jibqa’ hazin. Billi f’Malta hawn l-ipokrezija u hawn il-haxi ma jiggustifikax il-pljagjarizmu tieghek. Il-plagjarizmu hazin, jaghmlu min jaghmlu sinjura Alamango. Il-fatt li qed tiddefendi l-azzjonijiet tieghek jikkonferma dak li ili nghid jien ghal hafna snin: li fil-Partit Laburista m’hemmx professjonalita u kwalita fil-mezzi tax-xandir tieghu u fil-qasam tal-PR. Jiddispjacini hafna li jien bhalissa qed nappoggja partit li jittollera azzjonijiet bhal dawn. Int imissek tisthi mela tiddefendi lilek innifsek.
…
Mark Camilleri
U tkunx tifla u tiehu ghalik ghax din m’hijeix kwistjoni personali. Ministru Germaniz irrezenja fuq kaz ta’ plagjarizmu. Ghala m’ghandux ghalfejn ikollna l-istess standards etici f’pajjizna?
Nikita Alamango
Int bis serjeta ?? Qed tghix Malta jew le ? Hawn min ikkopja waqt ezami – hawn min seraq mill fondi ta studenti bhali u bhalek u hawn kazi ta korruzjoni cari u hadd f dan il pajjiz ma jirrezenja. Hawn min joqtol u ma jehel xejn. Jien mhux qed niggustifka xejn. Qatt mghidt li jien perfetta pero naf ezatt x gara u xejn mhu se sikkitni. Nerga nghidlek li mhux se nirrezenja.
Source: Nikita’s Facebook wall.
Says a lot, doesn’t it. Xi dwejjaq ta’ nies.
(And there’s more to that, but the rest of it is, predictably so, a bunch of anti-PN comments.)
Why is Cyrus not sticking up for his mentor?
Bob, he’s busy taking photos in Gozo. Nikita will have to wait.
Homo homini lupus applied to bloggers. How instructive. Who knows, maybe he got the idea reading the FT or simply thinking about your beautiful smile. What it’s clear is that you are all animals from the same circus.
Do you give credit to the contributors who inspire you?
[Daphne – Yes, as with the Manu Maltes story, when I said quite frankly that no credit was due to me because somebody had tipped me off. ]
Yes, you did Daphne… but only when someone praised you for uncovering it.
[Daphne – I could easily have done nothing of the sort, Malcolm, like Jacques. It’s not as though anyone would have found out.]
True. But how can you tell for sure that Jacques did read it here? Someone had also posted it as a comment on Nikita’s blog as well. He could have got it from there. He could have noticed it himself. How can you be so sure?
[Daphne – Why don’t you ask him, Malcolm?]
I can ask him, but it would be his word against yours wouldn’t it? He can claim that he found it out by himself and we cannot do anything about it. We cannot tell if it’s true or not. But here you are claiming that he found out about the plagiarising from your own blog. So I have to ask you as you are making such a claim. How would you know that he got it from here and not found it out himself without reading such a comment?
[Daphne – Because I know he reads this website minutely, has a bit of a fixation with it, and it’s too much of a coincidence. http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/occams-razor.htm ]
Uncovered what?!
A few months ago he did admit that he reads this website, but also added that he only reads the articles you write and not the comments.
[Daphne – Yes, right. Of course. Silly me.]
@ H.P. Baxxter: Manu Maltes’s penis of course ;-)
The Times link you gave above is no longer available.
[Daphne – Yes, Paul, that’s because The Times have sacked her and removed her article/s.]
Well somebody should copy them from Google Cache :PP
They’re all there : Just Add ” http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xDXe2qBcGgcJ: ” before the link to her blogs and you get them all..
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xDXe2qBcGgcJ:www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110810/blogs/global-markets-a-toxic-cocktail.379648+http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110810/blogs/global-markets-a-toxic-cocktail.379648&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com
I love it when fights erupt between rival bloggers. What neither side realizes is that they are directing traffic to one another, guaranteeing lovely ego-boosting website hits to their adversary.
Wait a sec, perhaps it’s all a conspiracy of some sort…
I always try to read his column on Sunday, but I never manage to finish them, because they’re so http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4122/4869449359_1576cf6d18.jpg
JRZ; chi cazz’ e`?
Boring, rambling …
http://www.akkuza.com/2011/08/13/and-now-the-runs/
And now Mr. Zammit is accuse-ing me of not existing, and is praising himself for catching all sorts of plagiarisms in Malta.
Did he, by chance, catch the one plagiarised sentence in today’s economic article by Karmenu Vella?
Karmenu Vella, Times of Malta:
“It was only a few weeks ago that EU leaders were assuring each other that the euro crisis was over.”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110813/opinion/The-looming-euro-crisis-storm.380020
Daniel Hannan, Telegraph blogs:
“It was only last week that EU leaders were assuring each other that the euro crisis was over.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100099004/cyprus-cabinet-resigns-as-euro-crisis-spreads/
Since the Telegraph post was published on July 29th, and Mr. Vella’s article today the ‘last’ became ‘a few.’
I am assuming the paraphrasing skills of Karmenu Vella’s ghost writer are a tad better than Ms. Alamago’s attempts to talk economese.
Curiouser and curiouser…………..
A cock-up in a toxic cocktail.
Plagiarism in Maltese journalism has always been something of a constant, and if we want to be politically balanced, you could mention Pippo Psaila. He and a certain well-known music critic that was caught lifting an article from the UK Independent in the days before the Internet.
[Daphne – I think the real problem with the music critic, who is Gerald Fenech – why not mention him? – is that he rubbished a piano recital (by Lucia Micallef, I believe) and then it turned out that he wasn’t even there to listen to it.]
Catching plagiarists is easy these days, so I really don’t see the need to turn it into a pissing contest.
It is not Gerald Fenech that I was talking about actually, but another person that wrote for The Sunday Times for many years. I refrain from naming him only because he is actually a good writer and journalist, but evidently a little lazy sometimes.
How many people do you have to copy from until plagiarism becomes research?
Plagiarism seems to have become a highly contagious disease with discoverers and denouncers of plagiarism (tipo J. R. Zammit) contracting the disease themselves.
If the trend continues, plagiarism should be added to the notifiable infectious diseases with patients being confined to some new Lazzaretto until they recover.
A plagiarist disclosing another plagiarist.
Does that make him a plagiarist² (squared) or a plagiarist x2
No. It makes him a Maltese dick-head.
An Idiots & Bamboozlers Guide To Cutting, Copying & Pasting, by Nikita & Jacques.
With dirty pictures by Cyrus Engerer, and a foreward by The Great Leader.
This Jacques would fit quite comfortably in the metaphorical skip.