Argus Media presents itself as the “leading independent provider of price benchmarks for energy and commodities.” Like other industry analysis firms, it sells its services in the open market. Being “in the know” and having a network of experts and analysts in the country is likely part of its selling point. Imagine the surprise yesterday when, after visiting this site, it published a “News” headline titled “Pdvsa signs purchase agreements with the Delaware firm,” which is a perfect example of plagiarism, almost word for word, from a post published here on December 29, 2018, titled “Breaking News: PDVSA partners with Harry Sargeant to increase oil production.”
This site reached out to Argus Media to inquire about its policies regarding plagiarism—without attribution—of other journalists’ work. Tom Fowler, the “news editor in Houston,” responded in a spectacularly misleading manner, asking if a link to our story could be sent, when in reality, he had already read it. When this site pointed out his absurd stance, Fowler replied: “Yes, I looked at your site today and saw a story after one of our reporters filed a story. Is that the only story you have on this?”
Where @ArgusMedia visits https://t.co/oZxGbLJB1f, copies my work word for word and tries to pass it off as its own without proper attribution pic.twitter.com/jTvjfs06Dc
— alek boyd (@alekboyd) January 2, 2019
Fowler then doubled down on his efforts, adding: “As I understand it from our correspondent, there was a press conference on December 26 where former minister Gustavo Márquez spoke about the service contracts from August and the new agreement. Our reporter spoke with them after the press conference. So these documents have been public for almost a week (although I haven’t seen them).”
When asked to indicate where public domain documents could be found, he fell silent. The press conference referenced was reported by the Venezuelan site Aporrea, with the appropriate attribution linked here. Aporrea did not publish any documents. Gustavo Márquez had not seen the originals and showed no documents at all; rather, he was reading from a piece of paper. The details about the Rosa Mediano and Tía Juana fields were made public for the first time in our story, published on December 29.
In addition to the obvious plagiarism, Argus Media’s “News story” contains false claims, some of which are highlighted in red in the image below.