It seems that republishing Bill Conroy’s work in Narco News and claiming it as one’s own is becoming quite the rage among commercial journalists. This comes after a long history of the Dallas Morning News going out of its way to ignore Bill’s work on the House of Death, despite the fact that nearly every major revelation in the case has appeared first in these pages, with his byline.

And of course, this comes less than two months after Semana magazine, the most widely read newsmagazine in Colombia, slapped a graphic on its cover screaming “Corruption in the DEA,”  with a corresponding story based completely on the Kent memorandum brought to light by Bill’s hard work, without ever mentioning where they got a copy of said memo.

Interestingly enough, Gerardo Reyes — who with his recent work in the Miami-based Spanish-language Nuevo Herald has been perhaps the only other journalist to take Bill’s lead and do his own investigation to try to uncover more of the mystery — did not hesitate to give credit where it was due. I suppose that’s to be expected, though; authentic journalists who are actually interested in working to reveal the truth help each other and recognize each others work, while career hacks only interested in prestige and a paycheck profit off the hard and often dangerous work of others any way they can.