Did an evangelical radio talk show host plagiarize text from an NBA Hall of Fame player?

• August 12, 2010 5:00am

William Alnor, assistant professor of communication, had new research accepted for presentation at the 2010 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Denver, August 4-7.  His paper, “An Inquiry into the Alleged Plagiarism of a Former NBA All-Star,” was reviewed by the Religion and Media Interest Group.

“Did evangelical radio talk show host Hendrick Hank Hanegraaff plagiarized text and images from former National Basketball Hall of Fame player Jerry Lucas’s work in the late 1980s? The works in question are Lucas’ book Ready, Set, Remember and Hanegraaff’s later book States and Capitals. This paper put the question of plagiarism to a panel of plagiarism experts who were shown eleven examples of text and images from the books. The results were inconclusive as four respondents said no, three said yes, and three were not sure. This case shows the difficulties with detecting plagiarism using limited text and images.”

EB