Plagiarism, as it would be with any course at Ohio University, is completely unacceptable at The Post.
This newspaper prides itself on original reporting done with honesty, and that is just as true on the opinion page. You, the reader, deserve nothing less. That is why Andrew Zucker's column does not appear here today.
When editing his column last night, I stumbled upon Arianna Huffington's blog on The Huffington Post. In her post from April 12 titled, The West Virginia Mining Disaster and the Financial Crisis Have the Same Root Cause
Huffington outlines how the fatal collapse could have been avoided. It begins like this:
Officials say it's too soon to pinpoint the exact cause of the tragic explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that took the lives of 29 miners
but we certainly know enough to identify the root cause. It's the same cause that led to the 2007 Crandall Canyon mine disaster in Utah that killed six miners and three rescue workers. It's the same cause that led to the 2006 Sago mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 12 miners. And it's also the same cause that led to the Lehman Brothers disaster
the Citigroup disaster
the bursting of the housing bubble
and the implosion of our financial system: a badly broken regulatory system.
Compare that with the first few paragraphs of Zucker's column for today, submitted Monday (grammatical mistakes included):
It's too soon to say for certain what caused an explosion at the Upper Branch Mine that claimed the lives of 29 innocent coal miners in West Virginia
but we know enough to determine its root cause. It's the same that lead to the 2007 Crandal Canyon Mine collapse that killed 6 miners and 3 rescue workers in Utah
the 2006 blow-up at Darby Mine No. 1 in Kentucky that left 5 dead
and the Sago Mine explosion earlier that year that buried 12
again
in West Virginia. It's also what lead to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other banking giants
the bursting of the housing bubble
