Sunday 19 March 2017

Creative Plagiarism by Daily Mail

A feel-good story came up on my newsfeed on Facebook today and it was rather compelling. It was the story about a homeless man in Spain who was given a makeover by a hairdresser in the neighbourhood that the man frequents.

This homeless man gets a dramatic makeover! ❤
Posted by Daily Mail on Saturday, 18 March 2017


A friend had shared the video and a comment in her thread was asking if the man had been helped more comprehensively than just a one-time makeover. My friend replied that he had in fact been helped back on his feet with housing and funding to carry him over for the next year or two. I wanted to verify it was true and clicked through the video's original post and read the comments.

The first comment that appeared under this video was by the Daily Mail itself that mentioned that "All credit goes to: https://www.facebook.com/Lasalvajeria/videos/1404404729579622/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HhWBovZXGM&feature=youtu.be". Both these links are of the same video below.


As can be seen, the original video chronicles the entire story and includes the backstory of the man and of the social experiment. The Daily Mail could have just shared this video without having to recreate this as a shorter clip - in fact, the shorter clip takes away a lot of the context and information. The only benefit of rehashing the original appears to be so that it could be rebranded as a Daily Mail video. It also seems that it legally avoids being accused of outright theft of content by mentioning the original producers of the content in the top right portion of the video clip posted by the Daily Mail.

However, these mentions do nothing to inform the viewer that the entire content is actually produced by someone else, nor offers any indication of this. Interestingly, the crediting of the original video remains buried in the comments section when it would be more appropriate as part of the caption. This is because, when the video clip is shared - which it has been by 130,000 other people, no one can see this credit.


Now, imagine if someone were to rehash someone else's work like this for a school essay, and the student acknowledges in some nondescript corner of the paper that the work was done by someone else, would it be acceptable? Isn't it interesting that something that will only impact a handful of people (i.e. for a school essay) is treated with such severity and held to such high expectations while something that shapes the opinion and understanding of millions need not be subjected to similar high standards?

The problem though can be defined by two culprits. One, is the overemphasis of the media to capture eyeballs (and clicks) rather than actually adhering to any form of journalistic integrity. The other is the ambivalent people who do not bother to admonish such behaviour and attitude by the media. They are instead rewarding this bad behaviour with a lot of attention and interest, and so, just like the insolent child, the media will continue to dish out worse behaviour because it knows you will attend to it.

It is high time for the people to stop indulging the media and being enablers of the bad behaviour. As any good parenting advice will tell you, we need to take the hard actions that will correct bad behaviour. Otherwise, this child is just going to get more blatant with the bad behaviour until one day, we can't control it anymore.

Then again, perhaps, that day is already here.