In every newsroom in every town and every city in America, plagiarism is a cardinal sin.

It’s a firing offense, and it usually means you'll never work in the field again. Plagiarism, when detected in journalism, results not only in the loss of employment, but also ignominy and public apologies. Everyone in the press understands the severity of lifting others' work without attribution.

Yet, from following the news coverage of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s rise and fall, you would think that the corporate press had just been introduced to the concept of plagiarism.

Indeed, even with irrefutable evidence that Gay had built her entire career on the backs of her peers, a good number of reporters and editors have expressed both disinterest and indignation over the story, as if they are annoyed that it exists at all. Some are downplaying the academic dishonesty that caused Gay to resign, while others are questioning whether stealing other people’s work is so bad in the first place.

It's not great that we live now in time where words that we in the press all agreed on just five minutes ago are suddenly up for redefinition or reconsideration for no other reason than personal partisan pieties.

In the days leading up to Gay’s resignation, certain members of the press even went as far as to pretend that they don’t already know plagiarism when they see it.

The New York Times, for example, initially shrugged at the story, citing Gay’s allies at Harvard who originally claimed that there was no there there. The paper’s first word on the matter was a story titled, “Harvard Clears Its President of ‘Research Misconduct’ After Plagiarism Charges.”

This story obviously did not age well following a more thorough investigation by Harvard and others. But ignore the more thorough investigation for a moment, and ask yourself this: Why did the New York Times take on faith the word of Gay’s subordinates at Harvard? Why not look at the actual evidence and decide for themselves, as various publications have done with so........

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