Stanley Pignal a journalist with The Economist, today accused abusive social media troll cum Journalist Swati Chaturvedi of plagiarising excerpts of his tweets. Pignal put out a tweet to provide proof for his accusations:
LOL. Outraged tribune in @dailyo_ against lax standards in Indian media… plagiarises both my tweets on Arnab! https://t.co/HX1bwXKbenpic.twitter.com/0twKNc2Jcl
— Stanley Pignal (@spignal) September 20, 2017
The article in question by Swati is ironically about Journalistic integrity where she writes about the episode of Arnab Goswami allegedly lying about covering the 2002 Gujarat Riots.
Pignal via his tweets uploaded two images which detailed the allegedly plagiarised portions:
As seen from the above images, the allegedly plagiarised phrases were:
If as a journalist you don’t report facts truthfully, then nothing else matters
Journalists who lie about what they claim they saw have no place in the profession
Soon a few people noticed the tweet and started to call Swati out. She as a possible defence feigned ignorance by claiming that she didn’t even follow Pignal:
You think so? I don’t even follow him. Will now.
— Swati Chaturvedi (@bainjal) September 20, 2017
Via this defence, she tried to insinuate that if she never followed Pignal, she never saw his tweet thus the charge of Plagiarism didn’t have any basis. Pignal didn’t taken take this response too kindly tried to question her further:
Don’t compound an offense with bad faith. Is your claim that you coincidentally, on the same day, crafted exactly the same words? Come on.
— Stanley Pignal (@spignal) September 20, 2017
He also asked her to apologise and give proper attribution. Which he stated shouldn’t be a problem as the dispute was only about two tweets:
Honestly best thing is to apologise, fix the article with attribution, – it’s a pair of tweets, for crying out loud – then move on.
— Stanley Pignal (@spignal) September 20, 2017
Swati still didn’t apologise but stated that she would make changes to her article:
I don’t follow you but will make the changes.
— Swati Chaturvedi (@bainjal) September 20, 2017
Since then it seems she has removed those sentences from the article but it remains to be seen if “DailyO” which carried the article, questions her about the incident.
This isn’t the only time Swati has been in the news for the wrong reasons. We had recently reported how BJP Delhi spokesperson Tajinder Bagga had filed a defamation case against her for allegedly spreading falsehoods about him on twitter. Plus apart from tweeting abusive things to people who don’t agree with her, she has also filed fake stories and resorted to targeted harassment in the past.
