RIP-OFF KING

When Boston Globe token conservative Jeff Jacoby pilfered a few items from the Internet for a column, re-wrote them and acknowledged elsewhere that he had borrowed from an email, he was suspendedfor four months. When New Republic star, Ruth Shalit, was discovered to have copied a handful of generic boilerplate sentences in a few long, well-reported, well-written pieces, I suspended her, and saw her suffer professional humiliation. When Larry King rips off almost an entire column directly from the Internet, he finds it funny. “I never pilfered anything. I’m 67 years old,” King said. “This is taking journalism to its nth idiocy. This is berserk. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets. If you find out who was the originator of ‘Maine is a one syllable state,’ I’ll print his picture and apologize on CNN.” King’s column was called “Things I learned while looking up other things.” The list began: “Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters ‘mt.’ . . . Almonds are a member of the peach family. . . . Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. . . . All clocks in the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ are stuck on 4:20. . . . Two-thirds of the world’s eggplants are grown in New Jersey.” Virtually everything in it can be found on those awful chain emails. Caught red-handed? Facing punishment? USAToday told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dan Fost that “we have no plans right now to discontinue the column.” Look, I think some of this journalism policing is overdone. But if you’re going to do it, it shouldn’t always be to pummel minor right-of-center writers instead of major talk-show hosts. No wonder King can’t stop laughing.