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Union leader's blog draws scrutiny
The posting initially failed to mention that information used in the entry came not from the author, but a variety of other sources.
By BILL ADAIR, Times Washington Bureau Chief
Published January 12, 2006
WASHINGTON - John Carr, the head of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, started a Web log last month to comment on the issues facing his union, especially its contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration. He said he would post commentaries when "I have something to say, which could be often."
But from time to time, his blog (http://themainbang.typepad.com/) has addressed other topics ranging from board games to Pearl Harbor, and in dealing with those subjects the words on his blog have sometimes not been his own.
On Jan. 5, Carr posted an item about the history of the board game Monopoly.
"On this date in 1904 Lizzie J. Magie, a young Quaker woman living in Virginia, received a patent on a board game she had invented as an easy, fun-filled method of teaching the evils of land monopolism," Carr wrote in a five-paragraph account of the game's history.
That paragraph and two others were nearly verbatim from a 1976 article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that was posted on a Web site. The rest of Carr's posting was copied from the Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia, but he did not attribute it.
Carr's credibility is important because his union has been in contract negotiations with the FAA.
His posting on Dec. 30 about the passage of the National Labor Relations Act was copied from a History Channel site and much of his Dec. 7 commentary on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack came from a U.S. Navy summary of the attacks, both without attribution.
When the St. Petersburg Times asked about his blog, Carr acknowledged he had erred by copying the material without listing the source.
"Mistakes happen," he said in an email message. "I use the Web extensively and some info is copyrighted, some not, some in the public domain, some private. I try to be intellectually honest with what I use."
By Wednesday morning, he had added attributions to his blog.
"I'm not a journalist," Carr wrote to the Times. "I'm a union president who surfs the 'Net. But I will definitely be more careful."
[Last modified January 12, 2006, 15:07:35]
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