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notoriety is too broad a category to do the work you want it to do, will. in history, for example, some of the folk with the greatest degree of notoriety were at the center of campaigns to drum them out of the profession. one of the pretexts was plagiarism---in that case, it was little more than a form of invective meant to cover over the real motives, which were personal/political. being at the center of such a thing doesn't help get grants. similarly, you could say that among "journalists" (which i put in quotes in order to extend it this far) limbaugh has a considerable degree of notoriety; other paragons of everything good about the press like geraldo rivera come to mind.
you probably mean reputation. but even there, this doesnt mean a single thing because what constructs it isn't made up of a single set of attributes. and there's no particular agreement about what constitutes reputation. there are companies that like to count the number of times a particular author is cited by others--these are marketed as an index of reputation--but the numbers take no account for the type of citation: they critical or otherwise. there are a bunch of other problems with these indices, but you get the idea.
connections is more accurate--who you're connected to, how much influence they have, etc. that gets you grants. reputation can be part of that but it isn't the same thing. nowhere near as effective.
the point is that the whole idea of plagiarism hinges on the status of an individual author--the name is supposed to function as a guarantee (hedged in by others of course)---television simply doesn't work in the same way---shakran knows way more about this than i do--but it seems that the central guarantee of accuracy in television is the sense of being-present that footage provides. contextual information typically is geared around the footage. if footage didn't serve this function, it'd be hard to imagine how fox news would be confused with an unproblematic information outlet.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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