Peeling or plagiarizing? A Danish media scandal as an incident of re-instating boundaries in the grey zones of “good” journalistic citing practices

This chapter looks at these grey zones by analyzing the scandal of Rasmussen, who was laid off from a number of freelance positions following accusations of plagiarism. The Rasmussen scandal illustrates various forms, as the scandal was discussed intensively in public and in the journalistic field, but it also led to some media organizations’ changing their internal rules of ethics related to specific citing practices, and the journalist in question was laid off from several different media organizations. In this specific incident, the actions of the journalist and columnist Rasmussen created a debate on the rules of so-called peeling, which refers to writing an article using multiple direct quotes from someone else’s work and attributing competing media in daily journalistic practice, and at the same time exposed contradictions between the dominant media ecology and the ideals of original journalism. Paradigm disguise is a variant of paradigm repair, which is defined as a journalistic ritual to defend professional ideology.