Scott Taylor, a veteran sports reporter and one of Canada's best-known sports pundits, has been accused of copying parts of an article that appeared in the Free Press sports section on Nov. 5 under the headline "Passing attacks have room to grow in the NFL."
According to an apology published on the front page of the Free Press's sports section Wednesday, "one of the quotes was taken from the daily newspaper USA Today, as was much of the text that appeared outside the quotation marks."
The Winnipeg Free Press published an apology on the front page of the sports section on Wednesday.
The story was about the NFL's stricter enforcement of the interference rule this year.
Taylor told CBC Wednesday he has done nothing wrong.
"I mean goodness gracious, you've seen quotes in the newspaper in stories 50 times in different articles with different bylines, and the quote goes to the person who made the quote, and quite often you never know where it originally came from," he said.
"A lot of these times they come directly from the teams. I was basically doing my job as a sportswriter the way all sports writers do their job."
Free Press editor Nicholas Hirst said the newspaper is reviewing measures to prevent similar incidents. And in this case, the Free Press had no choice but to apologize.
"You have to come clean," Hirst told CBC. "You can't present a staff member of the newspaper's work as his own, and your own, if it isn't."
Taylor was known outside of Winnipeg for his regular contributions to sports programming on The Score and CBC. He covered countless sporting events, including the World Series, Major League Baseball and NHL all-star games and the Stanley Cup, for the newspaper.
The incident is the latest in a series of ethical problems Canadian newspapers have weathered this year.
Earlier this month, National Post columnist Elizabeth Nickson lost her spot at the paper after failing to attribute parts of a column she wrote to another author at the U.S. magazine The National Review.
And in July, Brad Evenson, also of the Post, lost his medical reporting job after accusations he fabricated quotes and sources in several of his stories.
