David Edelstein, in writing a piece on Viswanathan and plagiarism went back into the archives of numerous publications to see what was written about the two subjects. He then chopped them up, taking certain excerpts from each and glued them back together into an feature in which only the first and last sentences were his own.

The idea was to find out how long it would take anyone to discover the plot.

One commenter at Romanesko noticed a phrase that had been taken by an article in another publication and turned out to be the only individual who noticed (at least publicly) even though sentences were nicked from numerous other articles, blogs and books. The mostly plagiarized article ends with "...you can't be sure that anything you read is original. Even this." 

In related news, a survey of 527 newspaper journalists conducted by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism released at a National Press Club meeting showed that "many factors hurt newspaper public trust":

• 7 out of 10 journalists had been accused of bias in the previous year
• 30% claimed sources misled them on information included in their work
• mistakes in the journalism of other media such as TV and blogs hurt newspapers' rapport with readers