Stories withdrawn from top journalism award for plagiarism

The All-China Journalists Association has canceled an article's candidacy for the nations' top journalism award for 2014 and withdrew a third prize given to a TV news report, citing plagiarism and forgery as the reason.

The candidate story of Shanxi Daily featured a man devoting himself into the investigation of the history of comfort women during WWII but was finished using other published stories, the association said.

They said it was a "serious" case of plagiarism with nine paragraphs identical to a previous story on the topic by a Beijing newspaper.

The video, which showed journalists risking their life for news coverage, was reprocessed from the original edition before being sent for the award, they said.

This is the first time the association publicly named and criticized violating stories since the award was established 24 years ago.

Works of the seven authors and editors involved in the two reports will be banned from being nominated for the award in the next four years. Their employers are banned from this year's competition.