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Home Front: Culture Wars
Socialist writer Chris Hedges identified as plagiarist
2014-06-13
Several examples in the linked article. Hedges once wrote for the NY Times and then later for The Nation. You may remember him from such hijinx as getting punished by the NY Times for his antiwar stance in 2003.

From TFA:
A moment, please, while I catch up. The New York Times had yet another fabulist on its payroll?! Good lord, does anyone there understand the journalist's creed?
Yet the new edition still did not credit Hemingway. "The wording was changed to throw camouflage over the plagiarism," Palaima said. "It was a cuttlefish approach—you spray ink into the water so no one can really see what's going on. The original idea is Hemingway's."

In response, Hedges told me that PublicAffairs representative Gene Taft was in error and that the passage "was noticed and corrected by me after the first edition was published. This was several months before the e-mail from Palaima." And: "The passage, when it was corrected, was sufficiently different from the Hemingway not to warrant attribution."

Palaima followed up with several more e-mails to PublicAffairs during June 2003 noting his concern, as he told me, that the publishing house was engaged in a "cover-up" that was "just dishonest." He got on the phone with the founder and CEO of PublicAffairs, Peter Osnos, who, according to Palaima, dismissed his argument as "that of a pedant's pedantry."
I would like that written on my tombstone.
Palaima left the conversation believing that Osnos thought it was important to protect Hedges.

In September 2003, Palaima published a piece on the Hemingway plagiarism in the Austin American-Statesman, in which he noted that plagiarists "are not merely stunting their own intellectual development or disappointing their professors. By disguising the fact that they are not speaking in their own voices, [they] diminish our belief that their voices are original and worth listening to." According to Palaima, when he and Hedges spoke on the phone prior to publication of the American-Statesman piece, Hedges suggested that Palaima was not competent to question his work. Palaima, a MacArthur Fellow and veteran classicist, replied that he was adhering to the basic rules of scholarship in which proper citation is given.
A pedants pedantry, indeed, as he insisted on defending the eminently defensible, merely because it was both right and true.
Posted by:badanov

#6  I'm starving for prose, to my sorrow.
I would gladly return some tomorrow
And be truly indebted
If I could take credit
For all of the stuff I might borrow.

An honest socialist will not steal,
Just redistribute meal by meal.
He'll make up your lack
When he gets off his back,
So live up to his genteel ideal!
Posted by: Zenobia Floger6220   2014-06-13 23:10  

#5  A socialist stealing from someone else?!?!?
Posted by: DarthVader   2014-06-13 15:51  

#4  Well, what do you expect - from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Just living the creed.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2014-06-13 08:39  

#3  Hey, he's a socialist. Property is crime, and all that. Feel free to use any of HIS stuff, because, well, he's a socialist.
Posted by: ed in texas   2014-06-13 07:07  

#2  Does regurgitating the Whitehouse talking points count as plagiarism?
Posted by: Airandee   2014-06-13 06:50  

#1  Good lord, does anyone there understand the journalist's creed?
Not to be confused with the copywriters creed at deadline, "You got eyes, plagiarize."
Posted by: Shipman   2014-06-13 04:42  

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