KFOR Social Media Bandit plagiarized a newspaper. You’ll never believe what happened next.

I've been working at KFOR for over a month now, and so far, I haven't had any big conflicts of interest between my job as Promo Joe's wingman and my duties as a media muckraking obscure local social blogger on this website. In fact, things have been going great at KFOR! Outside of Lorne Fultonberg and Abby Broyles constant bickering, everyone in the office has been really nice and welcoming. Mike Morgan even put his grudge aside and invited me to the 8th-annual Mike and Marla's Mardi Gras Masquerade on Fat Tuesday. Apparently you have to wear a mask, no underwear and be really comfortable around trains. The password to enter is "Fidelio."

Sadly, it looks like my KFOR honeymoon is about to come to end. I have some shocking but not-so-shocking news to report from the lair of the KFOR Social Media Bandit.

Yesterday, Tulsa World writer Samantha Vicent, who is usually writing about crime and death, but also has happier interests like the Far East, rural living, live music, corgis, and QuickTrip, pointed out some very very very very interesting similarities between a story she wrote about a rescheduled hearing for those psychopathic brothers from Broken Arrow and a KFOR piece that covered the same news.

Here are screenshots of the two stories. Let's pretend we're kids in the dentist's office looking at Highlights for Children and find the similarities and differences between the two:

Wow! There's basically two types of plagiarism in this world. There's regular plagiarism, like when you harmlessly take a couple of paragraphs from Wikipedia, rearrange the sentences, and swap out a few words for a research project at school, and then there's "Holy Shit, now that's what I call plagiarism!" plagiarism, like when a news organization totally rips off content from another news organization. Considering the KFOR Social Media Bandit blatantly copied three paragraphs from The Tulsa World, this obviously falls in the latter category.

After they were alerted to the gaffe, KFOR didn't apologize. They simply covered up the gaffe by condensing the plagiarized text into an "According to the Tulsa World" blurb:

Well, I guess that's better than nothing. The KFOR Social Media Bandit who wrote the original piece, Magean De La Torre, is going to make a great writer for Huffington Post or Daily Mail someday!

Anyway, you may want to leave a mean, highly critical comment about Magean for plagiarizing the work of another journalist, but as one of her co-workers, I'd suggest taking it easy on her. Being a Social Media Bandit is a high stress job. Not only does she have to meet ridiculous Facebook like and Twitter retweet quotas, but all the Social Media Bandits at KFOR have to work in a dirty cage next to Galen Culver. According to Magean, he says some pretty crazy shit:

And this is why Promo Joe lets me wear headphones when I'm at work!

Seriously, how can you expect to rewrite another journalist's work while Galen Culver talks crazy stuff to you? That's a huge distraction! Trust me, I know how easily a mistake can be made. Although I will admit that his Van Shea Iven impersonation is funny, Galen needs to calm down and be respectful to everyone at KFOR, from the promotions coordinator to the social media bandit, and let them do their work.