Chicken-Fried News: Cockroft presses send

Last week, Rep. Josh Cockroft, R-Wanette, was accused of plagiarism after posting a website column that shared identical portions of a Ryan T. Anderson-authored piece written for the Oklahoma Heritage Foundation.

The Lost Ogle posted excerpts from both, and Cockroft responded by saying he mistakenly published speech-related notes.

“After being made aware I had posted an errant column, I have removed it and replaced it with the correct version,” Cockroft wrote on his Facebook page. “The previous version was never meant to be published but was for my records alone, were personal notes for an upcoming speech and were published through an honest mistake. That version had many direct quotes without proper credit given to the author. I have fixed the problem and promise to be more aware in the future.”

It was an accident, y’all. For reals. Maybe.

The incident also raised the question of whether or not Cockroft was going to give credit in his planned speech.

However, a few days later, media discovered Cockroft’s column was also published (with lifted paragraphs) by his local newspaper.

OK, OK. It’s possible that Cockroft mistakenly published his notes online as he was trying to save them — the Internet is hard — and emailed the same piece to Tecumseh’s Countywide News.

The “send email” button does often look like a “save Word document button.” Right?

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