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All this happened initially more than three years ago, when Wente first came under attack from media moralists over alleged plagiarism. Now, the dogs of righteousness, those who don’t like her anti-feminist streak or her whip-cracking over the flabby flesh of environmentalists, are at it again. They claim to have identified fresh evidence that the Globe’s one and only female marquee columnist has breached the sacred bounds of journalistic ethics: She plagiarized.

The Globe itself fed the new anti-Wente frenzy by publishing two weasily “correction/apology” notices that apologized to two other American writers who did not ask for an apology and who do not feel an apology was necessary. But more of that later.

The real public attack on Wente came Tuesday from the CBC, via one of its top radio shows, As It Happens. In a six-minute interview, host Carol Off and guest John Miller launched a vicious rhetorical salvo that compared the Globe columnist to two of the most notorious journalistic fraud artists in modern U.S. history.

Miller, a retired professor and former chairman of the journalism school at Ryerson University — and operator of a blog titled TheJournalismDoctor — dodged and weaved through Off’s questions, ignoring facts and evidence in favour of his narrative. The Globe has a “very big problem on its hands,” Doc Miller said. “I’ll use the comparison to an American example. USA Today had a problem with its international reporter Jack Kelley about 10 years ago.” Kelley resigned along with two top editors at USA Today. Miller also compared Wente and the Globe to the case of Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter who also took down two editors when his sprawling bouts of journalistic malfeasance were exposed in 2003.