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Oh, where to begin.
I think it's piss poor journalism to write any news story solely relying on other journalistic institutions for your information. But, it's not plagiarism.
Plagiarism would be copying someone's actual writing and claiming it as your own thoughts. That's not going to happen on television very often, because even if we wanted to do it, newspaper writing style is so completely different from television writing style that a word-for-word newspaper article would be stilted, boring, and unwatchable on television. Such direct plagiarism is far more likely to be seen in academic papers, internet discussion forums, or, in fact, newspapers. Writers for papers nationwide, from backwater rags like the Honolulu Star bulletin all the way up to the New York Times have been found to have plagiarized passages, or sometimes entire articles. With the emergence of Wikipedia, such plagiarism has become somewhat more commonplace.
As for taking facts from a news article and repeating them in one's own work. Well, you yourself do that, Will, every time you bring up a fact in one of your political threads. Is there anything ethically wrong with repeating information that you obtained from media? I would say no, there isn't. After all, none of us expect you to call the White House and ask them who the president is every time you mention President Obama. Once news is out there, it's out there, and facts are not copyrightable - only the way in which the facts are presented can be copyrighted. Otherwise I could copyright the fact that Obama is president, and then sue anyone who mentions that fact. So no, using facts is not unethical, with one caveat.
If you don't do the research yourself, you stand the risk of the original media source being wrong, and therefore you too will be spreading false information. A glaring example is the time the Onion ran a story which claimed that the US Congress was planning to strike unless we built them a capitol building with a retractable dome. Readers in the US knew the Onion is satire, and was making fun of the ridiculous demands of baseball teams for new stadiums, but the Chinese media thought the Onion was a real paper, and ran the story as actual news.
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