NBC News admits to plagiarism

NBC News apologized to its readers on Monday for eleven articles over the past year that contained plagiarized passages. The network did not retract the stories, however, but removed the problematic paragraphs and added editors’ notes to them. The Comcast-owned network also didn't name the reporter at fault. Other outlets were not so circumspect, however.

The eleven articles “contained passages from other news organizations that were used without attribution,” NBC said in a statement. “In all cases, the passages were not central to the stories, but instead contained supplemental or background material that did not represent original reporting.”

“An editor’s note has been placed on each of the articles, and the passages that were plagiarized have been removed,” NBC added, without naming the reporter or revealing their fate with the company.

CNN’s Oliver Darcy soon did both, however. “I’m told that NBC discovered this during a routine editing process and launched a review where other instances were discovered,” he tweeted. “The reporter, Teaganne Finn, is no longer with the network.”

Finn previously worked at Bloomberg News as a breaking news reporter, and was hired by NBC to cover US politics in June 2021. Prior to her work at Bloomberg, she had interned on the investigations team of the Washington Post.