On August 12, 1996, Howard Kurtz, who writes about "The Media" for The Washington Post, wrote a column with the startling headline: Post Book Review Gets Unwelcome 2nd Printing .

The article describes how a book reviewer writing for the San Francisco Chronicle managed to publish a review of Jesse, Jesse Jackson's biography, which was almost entirely the same review written earlier and published in the Washington Post. Here's what Kurtz had to say:

You know you're in journalistic trouble when your best defense is: "We are both guilty of an incredibly tangled and embarrassing series of blunders."

That's the way Patricia Holt, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle's Book Review, explains how two-thirds of a review in her paper came to be lifted, almost verbatim, from The Washington Post's Book World.

Pleading incompetence, in this case, beats the alternative. "I'm not stupid," says Dean Wakefield, the Chronicle's opinion editor and author of the review in question. "I would certainly not plagiarize someone's work. That's just beyond the pale. . . . It was an honest mistake."

The incident that led to an apology and two corrections by the Chronicle began on June 2, when The Post published a review of Marshall Frady's biography of Jesse Jackson. The author was New York writer Jim Sleeper. Soon afterward, Wakefield, who had little experience reviewing books, was asked to review "Jesse" for his paper. He says he downloaded Sleeper's review to his computer to study it. This was a "mistake," Holt wrote in her letter of apology to Sleeper, "but I later compounded the problem with my own mistake." Holt says she grabbed what she thought was Wakefield's review -- Sleeper's byline had somehow been deleted -- from his private computer file and began reading it.

The Keystone Kops routine was just starting. Wakefield, returning from an out-of-town trip, says he got a message from Holt asking for the review and filed the piece: his own. Holt says she found this "not as strong" as what she believed to be his first draft, so she combined them. When the Sleeperized review was laid out on the cover of the June 30 book review, Wakefield says, he read the top, saw his own words and didn't bother to turn the page -- to the 12 paragraphs of Sleeper's language, right through to the last sentence.

Holt calls the episode her "worst nightmare . . . we're just feeling terrible for what we did to Sleeper and The Post."

Wakefield says he didn't agree with Sleeper's criticisms of "Jesse" that were published under his name. "I'm just totally devastated by this whole thing," he says.

Sleeper, for his part, remains skeptical. "While I don't have any reason to presume plagiarism," he says, "there's a level of incompetence and dereliction here that's unbelievable."

Consider some of the implications of this story:

• Wakefield admitted, according to Kurtz's story, that downloading the Sleeper's book review from the Washington Post's online edition was a "mistake." Why is it a mistake? What did he do wrong by just downloading the story? For help with answering this, check out the Post's Copyright Statement.