NYT's Ethicist Rips Off Colleague's Column

Is it right for an ethics columnist to steal a reader’s question from a colleague? It apparently is for the New York Times’ Randy Cohen, writes Alex Carnevale in Gawker. Today’s Ethicist column includes a question printed in another column last month. “The paper now has more advice columnists than questions for them to answer,” Carnevale writes.

The questioner asks whether it is ethical for a man to lie about why he stood her up—hit by a bike, he claimed—but the real question is why the Times let ex-David Letterman scribe Cohen rip off the query. “If they exercised good editorial judgment, we wouldn't have to listen to a comedy writer crib questions from other columnists because he couldn't make up his own,” Carnevale writes.
(More New York Times stories.)