When journalists are caught recycling material, a frequently-heard explanation is that they commingled notes – that is, they copied passages they admired, put them in their files and then, in the course of writing a story, mistook the borrowed work for their own.

This is essentially what Michael E. O’Neill, nominated by President Bush for a federal District Court judgeship, says is how he came to publish several articles that included material taken, without credit or attribution, virtually verbatim from other sources. O’Neill told the New York Times that he “blamed a poor work method.” The Times quoted him to the effect that he often mingled research materials and his own work in a single computer file. “‘I didn’t keep appropriate track of things,” said O’Neill. “I frankly did a poor and negligent job.’”

Commingled notes again, but with the added twist of being aided and abetted by a computer.

O’Neill’s description of his work habits recalls the extreme case of commingled notes by a Miami News sports writer, Tom Archdeacon, who faced loss of an ASNE writing award in the 1980s for an entry in which somebody else’s work found its way into his copy. Archdeacon confessed that, when he wrote the prize-winning story, he had mixed up more than a “hundred note pages, napkins, scraps of paper, a few things on a matchbook cover and even a few ideas written on the palm of my hand.”

ASNE’s board of directors deplored “that such gross carelessness and sloppiness could be part of the working procedure of such a talented writer,” but concluded that, all things considered, Archdeacon’s mistaken use of another’s phrasing was a “journalistic misdemeanor and not a felony.”

Professional writers are likely to be suspicious, with reason, of claims that a writer mistook somebody else’s language for his own. Writers don’t just string random words and thoughts together. The thinking that goes into writing is part of a creative process that makes each work distinctive – and readily recognizable to the author.

The work O’Neill passed off as his included dense passages hard for anyone not to recognize as someone else’s thinking. Moreover, O’Neill edited, and improved, some wording, a process that should have triggered reminders that the work isn’t familiar.

Journalists routinely are disciplined, and often fired, for plagiarism. The standards for a lifetime position on the federal bench ought to be at least as stringent as those for working on a newspaper. The multiple examples of what look like copying by O’Neill obligate Senators who vote on his nomination to be absolutely certain that he is guilty of being nothing more than slipshod.