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Apparently original reporting = reporting the original

This CNN-IBN report about Shashi Tharoor’s “cattle class” incident has half of its words lifted entirely from Tharoor’s tweets.

The report is 321 words long. 115 words are the full text of his tweets, and 28 words from the final paragraph are two of his earlier tweets re-written in third person. So 143 / 321 = 45% or nearly half of the report are Tharoor’s words, merely reproduced.

Oh, and lots of the other words are phrases like “The Minister, who is in Liberia on an official visit, tweeted late night on Thursday that he had…”, “he tweeted…” followed by the tweet.

@jeanmarsh first noticed this report. Also, turn to Rajdeep Sardesai’s and Suhasini Haider’s blog posts for solid opinion on the faux austerity drive.