"A local reporter attempting to cover President Obama's speech at West Point this week was not allowed in when he told security officials he had a hunting gun in the trunk of his car." And people try to criticize the Secret Service!


Monday is the deadline for the latest round of voluntary buyouts at the New York Times. Keith Kelly says only about 50 people will go voluntarily, which probably means about another 50 will have to be laid off. Happy holidays.


Ha, the Dallas Morning News has essentially taken itself out of the "journalism" business by having section editors report to the business side of the paper. The publisher dismisses the uproar: "I guess at the end of the day the only way I'll convince people is to tell them to check back in 90 days, 180 days, 365 days and see if anything has changed." Yea, you'd like that, wouldn't you? But we'd rather just never read you again, on principle.


A Nov. 10 "New Global Indian" online column [in the WSJ] by New York City freelance writer Mona Sarika has been found to contain information that was plagiarized from several publications, including the Washington Post, Little India, India Today and San Francisco magazine. At least, that's how I'd put this item, in my own words.

In an editorial posted to their website tonight, Gazette editor Jeff Thomas cited four separate occasions where Hailey Mac Arthur apparently lifted passages from past Times stories. Here's one of them:

Gazette, July 6: Few factors set homeless apart from the fortunate

Defining homelessness is politically charged these days. A word used 20 years ago to evoke compassion for the poor is increasingly accepted as shorthand for a grab bag of undesirables - the deranged, disheveled or destitute. Yet the same word applies to the largely unseen women and children who make up more than a third of the homeless in Colorado Springs.

. . . The homeless usually bear their losses in silence, their misfortune unreported and their offenders unknown.

NY Times, Dec. 5, 1999: Labeling the homeless, in compassion and contempt

Defining homelessness is politically charged in New York these days. A word used 20 years ago to evoke compassion for the poor is increasingly accepted as shorthand for a grab bag of undesirables, the deranged, disheveled or destitute. Yet the same word applies to the largely unseen women and children who make up almost two-thirds of homeless shelter residents in New York City.

According to the bio on her blog we found through Google cache (she's set her blog to private and deleted her Facebook, LinkedIn and Google profiles), Hailey Mac Arthur is a second-year student at the University of Florida College of Journalism who has also interned at the Gainesville Sun. Back in April she conducted a hilariously salacious interview with Gay Talese over the phone and wrote about it on her blog. Here are some of the highlights:

I interviewed Gay Talese in my underwear.

It was a phone interview.

Perhaps the ultimate irony in all of this is that young Hailey Mac Arthur's writing seems to have some Maureen Dowd-ish qualities to it, no? Too bad Mac Arthur couldn't get away with concocting some sort of ridiculous "my friend told it all to me over the phone" excuse like Dowd so famously did back in May when she plagiarized TPM's Josh Marshall. If there's any justice in the world maybe the Times will give Hailey Mac Arthur her second chance. After all, everyone does deserve one.

A Breach of Trust [Colorado Springs Gazette]
pic via Hailey Mac Arthur's blog

Anderson should be given his due for what he's accomplished with Wired. His magazine took home a general excellence prize at the latest National Magazine Awards, along with the prizes for design and best magazine section. It is a favorite of our own readers, and a formidable title.

But Wired is not without its problems, which Anderson is arguably too distracted to fully address. Examples:

Wired.com: A magazine obsessed with technology should have no trouble integrating its print and online editions, but by most accounts the two sides remain deeply divided at Wired, stunting the magazine's online strategy just as print readers increasingly jump online.

Joel Johnson's Boing Boing post is the definitive word on the matter, along with the comments underneath. But there's also history. After Condé Nast acquired Wired.com, Anderson initially ran it as a separate company. He once slammed its interface to bolster the print edition.

And, readership trends be damned, Anderson has made cuts to the online staff, twelve in November and an additional round in April (Condé Nast said only three staff were let go in April, but wouldn't tell us how many freelancers/permalancers/contractors were also cut).

UPDATE: As Anderson points out in an email to us, he does not run Wired.com. But integration is a two-way street, and Anderson at least shares responsibility for friction between the online and print sides, as described in the Johnson thread, and for their disparate strategies. And as his title's top editorial executive, Anderson is in a position to push for changes in the relationship between print and online.

Galavanting over advertising: Anderson makes an estimated $2 million a year giving around 50 speeches, according to numbers compiled by the New York Times. This lucrative circuit takes him to places like Oslo, Norway, where he recently lectured a gathering of marketers. The trips, we hear, do not sit well with Condé's publishing side.

Plagiarism: Anderson has said that, in lifting material off Wikipedia for Free, he simply forgot to convert some footnotes to in-line attributions within the body of the text. But even with attribution, he should have paraphrased the material or, failing that, used quote marks.

Books counter to the recessionary zeitgeist: Granted, the most useful books often demolish conventional wisdom. And successful authors often face swift backlash from New York's finicky media elite. But it's worth noting that Anderson's book Free is coming out at precisely the time many businesses are finding new ways to charge charge customers, rather than new ways to give things away.

Likewise, the sort of niche Web content one might have invested in after reading Anderson's last book, the Long Tail, is faltering amid the advertising downturn.

(Pic by Pop Tech 2008)

Like so many plagiarists before him, Anderson claims his act was unintentional. The Virginia Quarterly Review first reported his copying, and the explanation he gave us is that he and his editors decided to kill Free's footnotes "at the 11th hour;" though much attribution was restored within the body text, Wikipedia sources were not. This was due, according to the statement he sent to VQR, to "my inability to find a good citation format for web sources (I resisted the time stamp proposal)."

The upshot: Print authors like Mike Pollan were cited for "intellectual debts" Anderson owed them, while many of the forward-thinking, freely-contributing writers Anderson champions in the book got no attribution. As it happens, this is violates the copyright license governing Wikipedia.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Like Maureen Dowd before him, Anderson promises to fix everything on the Web:

We'll have the original notes that were supposed to accompany the book, which includes all these, online by publication date

Update: Hyperion, Anderson's publisher, has gave a statement to VQR backing his mistake-not-plagiarism spin:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

Hasselbeck's masterwork has the catchier-sounding title The G-Free Diet: A Gluten Free Survival Guide, but what lies within bears a wealth of similarity to Living, Hassett and her attorneys claim.

TMZ has gotten their mitts on the legal documents, which detail the many suspicious likenesses between the two books. Chapter names, phrasing, and content, etc. Some examples:

So, hm! Not exactly smoking guns, but warm ones perhaps. While we're not terribly certain just how many ways there are to write a book about Celiac Disease and diet, we're also not sure that Hasselbeck (although she is a Boston College graduate!) has the wherewithal to come up with anything on her own steam, unless it's some bird-language rave about Sarah Palin.

Anyone read her book in full? Or Hassett's? Let us know!

So you can go through her terrible speech and read some old Gingrich op-ed and painstakingly find every sentence or phrase that rings similar, if you want, and cry "plagiarism!" But we gave up on that once we read this bit of Palin's speech: "Recently, Newt Gingrich, he had written a good article about Reagan...." She then goes on to summarize many of the things Newt Gingrich wrote about Ronald Reagan.

So, yes, it is not by any standard a very good speech, and it is quite lazy, but to call it "plagiarism" is bullshit.

See, the problem with the last column was that it was all about "issues" and "an important political debate" and she tried to make "points" using "evidence" to advance an "argument." That is not what Maureen Dowd does! No wonder she needed Josh Marshall's uncredited help! No, what Maureen Dowd won those hundred Pulitzers for was "fanfic about politicians making liberal use of embarrassingly out-of-date pop cultural references." Hey, so, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney walk into a bar, right...

"That was funny when you were on Fox and Neil Cavuto called you Obama's ‘ball and Cheney,' " Rummy grins, taking a gulp of his brunello.

Dick grunts, raising a fork of his Risotto Gucci with roasted free-range quail.

"The punks thought they could roll over us," Vice mutters. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."

Hah. That is a line from the popular 1987 film Dirty Dancing. The guy from Road House (may he rest in peace!) says it. Wouldn't it be incongruent and therefore hilarious if that cantankerous old Republican politician Dick Cheney said it?

Dowd is also back to impugning Obama's masculinity, of course, because he is adopting some of the national security arguments of the manly, psychotic Republicans. Also she is calling George H. W. Bush "poppy." The only person Maureen Dowd is plagiarizing today is Maureen Dowd!

In a short post on Talking Points Memo last night, Marshall wrote:

I generally think we're too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism. I haven't said anything about this because I really didn't think I had anything to add. Whatever the mechanics of how it happened, I never thought it was intentional. Dowd and the Times quickly corrected it, which I appreciated. And for me, that's pretty much the end of it.

Marshall's obviously taking the high road here, effectively joining a chorus of others who have given Dowd a pass in this matter, as did the Times itself in a statement issued by a spokesperson:

Maureen had us correct the column online as soon as the error was brought to her attention, adding in the sourcing to Marshall's blog. We ran a correction in today's paper, referring readers to the correct version online.

There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error. It was corrected. Journalists often use feeds from other staff journalists, free-lancers, stringers, a whole range of people. And from friends. Anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with Maureen's work knows that she is happy and eager to give people credit.

Though Marshall's blessing may now help Dowd and the Times bring this matter to a close, we stand by an assertion made on Monday by our own Hamilton Nolan about the Times' hypocrisy in regards to the creation of content:

Let's point out that the NYT is one of the loudest newspaper voices bemoaning the idea that they create all the original content and the internet rips it off, in a one-way downhill dance of media thievery. In fact, the NYT itself has a grand tradition of stealing stories from smaller regional papers, parachuting in their own correspondents to re-report and repackage those stories for a national audience.

All papers do that! But none as well as the Times.

Yeah, exactly. What he said.

Very Briefly on Dowd [TPM]

There was a time when this little plagiarism incident—even if inadvertent—would have been a big deal. But the "new media" these days, always with the copying and the pasting and paraphrasing—you can see how this could happen by mistake.

So let's give her the benefit of the doubt! Then let's point out that the NYT is one of the loudest newspaper voices bemoaning the idea that they create all the original content and the internet rips it off, in a one-way downhill dance of media thievery. In fact, the NYT itself has a grand tradition of stealing stories from smaller regional papers, parachuting in their own correspondents to re-report and repackage those stories for a national audience.

All papers do that! But none as well as the Times. And just as blogs use NYT stories for raw material, the paper does the same; since they're too straitlaced to stray from polite discourse, they'll just pull what they want to say from a blog, i.e. "Rupert Murdoch has always had his detractors; Snark-purveying wags at Gawker even described Mr. Murdoch as a 'piss-drinking mummy' and insinuated he had sexual relations with several lowland gorillas on a trip abroad, though that could not be independently verified."

They can't say it, so they let us say it, then they say what we said! Just like we use their reporting as a launching pad. Let's just admit we're one big interconnected ecosystem here. We wouldn't want MoDo to get fired anyhow. We're the only ones who get something worthwhile out of her.

[Feel free to borrow our Pinch Moose jokes, NYT.]

The controversy started when the following 45-word passage appeared in Dowd's column, titled "Cheney, Master of Pain," on Sunday:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Now compare that to Marshall's 43-word passage from a Talking Points Memo post on Thursday titled, "Bubbling":

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The similarities were caught by a TPM contributor on Sunday afternoon who pointed out that the only difference between Dowd's words and Marshall's was that Dowd used the phrase "we were" instead of "the Bush crowd was."

On Sunday night, in emails to "The Nytpicker," a blog devoted to covering the goings-on at the New York Times, and the Huffington Post, Dowd admitted that the similarities weren't accidental and that she had indeed plagiarized Marshall, though she placed the blame for the mishap squarely on one of her friends.

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Having looked at this from every possible angle, would it be completely out of line to state that there's something distinctly bullshit-y about Dowd's explanation? Dowd, who ironically played an integral role in exposing Joe Biden's speech plagiarizing in 1988, needs to explain the "my friend did it" excuse in more detail. Who is this mysterious friend who helps Dowd limp across the finish line of the marathon that is two 750 word columns per week for the Times? Was the conversation in question over the phone, in which Dowd would have written down her friend's words in a note, or was it via email or instant messenger, where perhaps there's an electronic record of the exchange? And finally, why was Dowd needing help expressing the thought contained in the passage in question, a sequence of words which, with no disrespect directed at Josh Marshall, don't seem all that remarkable. It's a point well made with words, for sure, but it's not something that couldn't have been expressed in a number of different ways.

Look, most people who write can sympathize with being "blocked" occasionally, perhaps even spitting out a thought via a sentence or two that was conceived by reading something written by someone else that went on to take root in the subconscious, perhaps then creating the appearance of plagiarism when in reality there was no writerly malfeasance involved, but this, this just doesn't seem to make any sense. At all.

If there's one absolute certainty to come out of this whole fiasco it is this: If Maureen Dowd needs help from friends composing two cohesive 750-word arguments per week, she'd be one hell of a shitty blogger.

NY Times' Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall[TPM]
Dowd Admits Plagiarizing to TNYTpicker [The NYTpicker]
Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM's Josh Marshall[HuffPo]
[Trainwreck photo via On The Brink]

A piece on Japan's bullet trains published today by John Glionna is datelined "Nagoya, Japan." Some of it, though, could have shared a byline with the world's greatest collection of trainspotter trivia. Compare Wikipedia's entry on Japan's high-speed Shinkansen trains to Glionna's description of the advanced rail system:

Designed to traverse Japan's mountainous terrain, the trains use tunnels and viaducts to go through and over obstacles rather than around them. They travel on elevated tracks without road crossings and apart from conventional rail. An automated control system eliminates the need for signals.

Wikipedia:

In contrast to older lines, Shinkansen are standard gauge, and use tunnels and viaducts to go through and over obstacles rather than around them. With a minimum curve radius of 4,000 meters (2,500 meters in the oldest Tōkaidō Shinkansen), the system was built entirely from the ground up on elevated tracks without road crossings and separate from conventional rail. It employs an ATC (Automatic Train Control) system, eliminating the need for signals.

Glionna:

Officials boast that on average the trains are less than half a minute late each year, which includes delays caused by earthquakes, typhoons and snow. During the line's 45-year history and transport of 7 billion passengers, there have been no deaths from derailment or collisions.

Wikipedia:

During the Shinkansen's 44-year, nearly 7 billion-passenger history, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons.

The Wikipedia article has a note from the site's volunteer editors that the article's "sources remain unclear." We'll give Glionna, who became a foreign correspondent the Times last year, some credit on that count: At least it's obvious what his source was.

(Photo via Lassie, Get Help)

The Ann Arbor (Michigan) News is going the Seattle P-I route, folding its print paper and going online-only, with a skeleton staff. Expect to see a lot of failing papers try this in the coming year—it's a relatively cheap gamble, and it it actually works, you retain the paper's valuable brand at a fraction of the price. But who knows if it will actually work! Also worth noting that this paper is owned by Advance, which just announced mandatory furloughs and cutbacks at its other papers. Advance also owns Conde Nast, and this may or may not be an indicator of larger financial issues there.

Two new magazines are starting up, now! They're parenting magazines in Long Island. Line up, J-school grads.

News from my home state: In Ocala, FL (childhood home of John Edwards' mistress!) the editor of "an award-winning local lifestyle magazine" plagiarized national news outlets at least 20 times, including one story that was lifted verbatim and published as a column on said editor's upcoming wedding. The lady's excuse: "Producing 17 issues a year is a huge responsibility." Mmm hmm. In her defense, that excuse is not as far-fetched as the notion that Ocala, FL has "an award-winning local lifestyle magazine."

The weekly paper in Carbondale, Colorado folded, so the citizens there just pulled together and put out a paper themselves, volunteer-style! Would this work in LA?

WSJ editor Robert Thomson is the bearer of good news! All his staff's mandatory hard work is paying off. This memo went out today:

Dear All,

Amidst the bleak, almost apocalyptic prognostications for the
newspaper industry, it is worth focusing for a moment on the increase
in the Journal's audience over the past year. We are the only large
paper in the country seeing a significant increase in core circulation
(papers for which people actually pay). The website, depending on the
month, has virtually doubled in size since the News Corp acquisition,
the WSJ mobile reader (stats attached) is a phenomenon, and the new
sports page has cult status.

The first slide in this immodest set is from our latest
reader-tracking study which long predates the News Corp purchase. It
is fair to say that the researchers have never seen such positive
returns during a survey period. Former subscribers are now twice as
likely to resubscribe. There is no doubt that revenue remains
"challenged", but there is a large and growing audience for our
content,

Robert.

The New York Observer got a copy of an upcoming Editor's note from Fortune apologizing for Gimbel's ripoff. Gimbel's story, about Russian oil company Lukoil, is here; the 2004 NYT mag story he stole from is here. Was Gimbel just rushing to make deadline, or what? The NYO has several examples of similar passages, but just one is enough to show that he obviously was putting very little thought into concealing his apparent crime:

TIMES MAGAZINE:
He did well in high school and graduated from the Azerbaijan Institute of Oil and Petrochemistry, after which he worked on the Oil Rocks, a fabled offshore field in the Caspian Sea. The facilities were Dickensian. He lived on primitive rigs prone to explosions, fires, storms and other disasters. On one occasion, a blowout on his rig threw him into the storm-tossed Caspian, and he had to swim for his life.

FORTUNE:
He graduated from the Azerbaijan Institute of Oil and Petrochemistry and soon went to work on the Oily Rocks, a storied offshore city on the coast of the Caspian Sea. The conditions there were famously treacherous. Once, during a storm, a blowout on his drilling rig sent him flying into the high seas, and he had to swim for his life.

Really. At least try to get away with it. [NYO]

CORRECTION: This post originally said, incorrectly, that Gimbel was fired—in fact, the Observer reports he quit last week.

The tale of a winter pageant where a child displays a letter sign upside-down, turning "Christmas Love" into "Christ Was Love," was written by Candy Chand and published in Clarity in 1999, Motoko Rich reports. Walsch's excuse: Someone sent him Chand's story, unattributed, and he put it in his clippings file. He then retold it so many times he forgot it didn't actually happen.

Ah yes, the clippings-file excuse — a variant of the one historian Doris Kearns Goodwin trotted out to explain away her plagiarism. And the sloppiness excuse — the one Ruth Shalit used. Walsch, in short, isn't original even in his outrageous defenses of obvious plagiarism.

Upon being shown the evidence, Tierney, who had never read the book, concluded it was plagiarism. More bemused than angry, he remarked, "It's at the very least unattributed lifting..."

Young did in fact footnote Tierney's article in the book, however. "I don't think it's a sort of mealy-mouthed or weasely defense to say that the standard that British journalists are expected to hold themselves to are not as high as the standards that some American journalists hold," he explained to Intel.

Hah. A mere cultural misunderstanding, then—British foreign correspondents, for example, are notorious for their rewrite jobs. In America, however, this is the sort of reasoning that can and will get you fired, Toby!

[Daily Intel]
[Photo: Nikola Tamindzic/Home of the Vain]

—

Andrew Sullivan argues that all the shit that happened to McCain—"sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating"—now falls under the category of perfectly legal enhanced interrogation, as practiced by the United States across the world. With McCain's approval! Hooray!

(Of course U.S. law requires that detainees are treated to one night of a guard quietly scratching a crescent into the sand every year on a holy day of their choosing.)

Oh, and no one yet knows when McCain first remembered the guard that drew the cross in the ground with a stick or why he did not mention this fact until 1999, but the story is not from Solzhenitsyn at all but rather from Watergate crook turned evangelical wingnut Chuck Colson, who claimed he heard it from Jesse Helms, who said he heard it from Billy Graham in 1977.

John McCain seems to have a habit of making up his own biography to fit whatever his circumstances require and then seeming like he believes his own nonsense. Maybe it relates to those years of torture, during which he'd only give up useless information to his captors, like the starting defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers (sorry, wait... that was the Packers.).

What's funny about this "debate" before cartoonish Stuart Smalley-esque touchy-feely evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren and his million followers is that we know Obama's gone to church every week for years and the closest we've seen McCain to worshiping Yahweh is when that North Vietnamese prison guard he borrowed from the Solzhenitsyn anecdote scratched that cross in the sand. (Amusingly, this plagiarism was first noted by the right-wingers of Free Republic back when Conservatives hated McCain for being a MAVERICK.)

But what matters, obviously, is not actual religion conviction—or even the facade of conviction that actual church-attendance lends—but kowtowing to morons. McCain, who first bit his tongue to appeal to his party's idiots about five years ago and has not yet let up on it since, won the debate by proudly announcing that he has the moral authority to recognize and personally wipe out evil in all its forms, while Obama foolishly went for the "humble and meek" vote. The pundits will probably call it his "complexity" problem but he actually erred in sounding like a real Christian. McCain, not even sure which denomination he is supposed to pretend to be, only had to assuage these politically exhausted evangelicals that, like Republican presidents before him, he would ban abortion forever and shut down the ACLU and make it a crime for newsreaders to not wear flag pins.

And, while everyone rightly says Obama "lost" the debate, it also happened on a Saturday night during the damn Olympics, and as we already said, just showing up for the photo-op was more or less the entire point of his attendance. Hooray for Michael Phelps!

Ladyman on Rosen: "He truly acts like the rock-and-roll or the music critic. And if you don't talk to him right away and for as long as he wants to, he feels slighted."

From copying writer in question, Mark Williams, who claims he found all the material he plagiarized in press releases:

"Mr. Rosen: I suppose it is time that we made contact, since I seem to be your favorite new obsession. For such a heralded and busy journalist, it is obvious that you have an abundance of free time in your daily schedule. You have done an exemplary job of exposing the seedy underbelly of duplicitous small town weekly newspapers and the evil doers that run them. You have indeed brought us to our knees."

"I sincerely apologize for my crimes against you and any perceived damage done to your person or your career accomplishments. It was never my intention to cause you harm. The article in question was included in other press materials I had received via e-mail. I used parts of the article as background and did so thinking it was cleared for such use; but, as you have so subtly pointed out, I was mistaken."

"...It must have taken years of seasoned investigative know-how to push me off my lofty perch. It takes a dogged, intrepid journalist to expose the alleged wrongdoings of a 44-year-old college dropout who drifted from one lousy media job to another for 20 years; it takes courage to debase someone with a mouthful of cut-rate dentures who, up until 2007, lived in his parents' home for seven years due to near-fatal bouts of clinical depression; it takes a journalist of a certain caliber to torpedo a pathetic hack who has barely squeezed out a living for nearly a decade at seven cents a word."