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In your example, you are guilty of piss poor journalism, and I would go so far as to say of being an idiot, because only an idiot would take such an unsubstantiated claim as fact without checking into it, but you are not guilty of plagiarism.
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this actually gets to one of the points i was trying to make earlier.
why is plagiarism a way to get to questions of the quality of information and/or journalism?
what do you assume plagiarism to actually be?
what does it's occurance imply?
keep in mind that this is a genre-specific and function-specific notion: it has no particular meaning in some contexts. for example. you could say that many of ezra pound's cantos are plagiarised if you wanted to because the pieces are basically collages.
what does that fact say about the cantos?
well, it says something obvious about method, but nothing---at all----about the pieces themselves. you could, i suppose, say that pound was a hack because of the procedure--but you'd probably be laughed at.
and this is just the tip of a considerable and seemingly growing field of work that takes re-appropriation/plunder as it's point of departure.
the point of mentioning a rather old book of poetry here is simply to reinforce the claim that plagiarism is not some universal, unequivocal notion.
so if the claim of plagiarism is being made, it has to be made in a context that you could plausibly imagine dominated by a community that enforced the notion of plagiarism, usually for pretty specific social reasons.
is television journalism such a community?
i don't think so---but this says nothing about the quality of journalism--it simply says that the question of quality of journalism is about something else, and the standards for evaluating it lay elsewhere.
for example, there's not a whole lot of emphasis on individual authorship in a broadcast news context as a guarantor of the integrity of the piece, as there is supposed to be in an academic research publication context. there just isn't.
it's really quite strange, this tack. the more i think about it, the less i think it does or says.
as far as i think you can go with it is that television infotainment is not necessarily reliable.
i would have thought that an a priori.
so...what are we doing again?
[[edit: sorry about all the moving around of sentences---this became more complicated to organize than i expected when i started]]