Newly arrived Reuters media writer Jack Shafer, recently of Slate, has written about the perils of plagiarism and the zero-tolerance policy that ought to accompany transgressions in a newsroom's midst.

Shafer says the real victims are not the creators from whom words are lifted, but the audience that must be denied original work. He wrote in the context of the firing by Politico of a reporter whose work appeared to plagiarize on seven counts.

He writes aggressively about the lack of mitigating circumstances available to the plagiarist seeking a second chance.

"It doesn’t matter if you pinched copy because you were tired, you were harried, your spouse or child was sick or dying, you were under deadline pressure, you jumbled up your notes, you took boilerplate or wire copy that nobody should really claim “authorship” over,  you have a substance problem, you committed a cut-and-paste error, you were blinded by the warp speed of the Internet, you were a victim of the win the morning culture, you are young and inexperienced, you had two windows open at the same time and confused them," he writes.

"These aren’t excuses. These are confessions. And they mitigate nothing."

This week, prominent columnist Johann Hari of The Independent confessed an extensive record of plagiarism and a healthy dose of harassing his rivals through nasty Wikipedia entries.

He said he would return a writing prize and take a four-month leave to train himself in journalism fundamentals. The news organization said it looked forward to his return.

Hari said he had massaged quotes, often simply taking from some other source or someone's writing, when his interviews didn't yield material of a particular grade.

The Economist, in its Bagehot blog, has summarized the experience and added some context of the ethical dilemma for the foreign correspondent. It notes the challenge of character for the journalist whose work might not be easily verified.

The blog finds great fault with Hari and greater fault in those defending him. It also frets about what

The Washington Post has acknowledged copy-and-paste plagiarism from The Arizona Republic and suspended a Pulitzer-winning reporter for three months for publishing other's material as her own.

Sari Horwitz, a veteran investigative reporter, was suspended following stories on legal proceedings against Jared Lee Loughner, indicted on dozens of charges in the recent Tucson shootings of a Congresswoman and a state judge, among others.

The Post was alerted to the plagiarism by The Republic this week and took little time to act. It determined that two paragraphs from one story and 10 from another first appeared in The Republic. They were copied and pasted into a Word document with other notes and later filed the paragraphs for the Web as if they were original.

The news organization has apologized, as has Horwitz, and noted in the online stories that they contained reproduced material.