Jim Goldman, the shameless Apple parrot and CNBC correspondent, did his best for the computer company in an on-air price comparison the other day. But he had to lift his argument wholesale.

As our colleagues at Gizmodo have reported (see update), when Goldman told On the Money's Carmen Wong Ulrich that Windows PCs are more expensive than they appear, each of his talking points was taken from this BusinessWeek article by Arik Hesseldahl. (The arguments, a list of costly extras supposedly required to make Windows machines as good as Macs, are neatly summarized in the CNBC graphic below. A clip of the appearance is above.)

The duplication of six data points between the BusinessWeek story and Goldman's CNBC segment would be enough, on its own, to give away Goldman's cribbing. But the real tell that Goldman didn't do his own work was his sloppy copying of BusinessWeek's comparison: Hesseldahl wrote that a PC buyer would need Adobe's low-end Photoshop Elements to match the Mac's built-in iPhoto. In the CNBC graphic, Goldman rendered this as "Photoshop" — a much more expensive program that doesn't come with a PC or a Mac. (Hesseldahl has now accused Goldman of "borrowing" his column, and pointed out other errors.)

Perhaps Goldman should go back to taking his lines direct from the mouths of Apple flacks. At least then there wouldn't be a paper trail of his copying, as there was this time around. Or the probability of an uncomfortable discussion with his boss about the exact boundaries of plagiarism.