Ken Parish Perkins, longtime TV critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has resigned after a plagiarism inquiry. Seems he took a paragraph from Entertainment Weekly and plopped it, verbatim, into one of his columns, amid other alleged transgressions.

As today’s Star-Telegram confesses:

Popular TV critic Ken Parish Perkins, whose nimble intellect and insightful writing have entertained and intrigued readers for nine years, has resigned after instances of apparent plagiarism were found in some of his work.

A caller to the paper last week pointed out that a Nov. 10 story by Perkins included a paragraph without attribution that appeared verbatim in Entertainment Weekly magazine.

After editors talked to Perkins about the issue, he was suspended while they checked his previous work.

What they found were several stories and columns over about a two-year period in which he used either whole sentences or long phrases in sentences that were taken from other newspapers, magazines and Web sites verbatim without attribution of any kind.

Almost all of the questionable content involved a sentence or two of background material found far into the story. But the evidence represented a clear pattern to Star-Telegram editors that Perkins was violating our ethics policy on attribution of material that was not original.

When presented with the facts, Perkins chose to resign.

Poor Ken. If only he were a blogger. Then he could have merely linked back to the Entertainment Weekly story and all would have been forgiven.

Technorati tags: Entertainment Weekly, Media, Ken Parish Perkins, Plagiarism, Journalism