Help debunking Coulter plagerism investigation

[sakabatou]

Have they found the evidence of plagerism? If so what? I need had evidense to get this Annthrax fan off my ass.

[flowomo]

1. the case against her was weak....

I despise Coulter, and personally removed her column from our local newspaper in 2001 when I was the editorial page editor, but these accusations were silly -- mostly sentence fragments involving the presentation of facts, not opinions, conclusions, arguments or insights. Not a stealing of good writing or illuminative phrasing.

[Erika]

4. I've heard litigation is pending but that is the least of her problems

As Cedar Rapids said, even the conservatives don't want her writing columns anymore claiming she's a fringe element.

[flowomo]

5. right, she's a total jerk....

but the plagiarism stuff is nonsense, from the evidence I've seen. I teach college journalism, and I show my class plenty of real plagiarism, and this isn't close.

[Nevernose]

10. Would it be fair to say....?

That her biggest problem was sloppy source citation? That's what many in the MSM have said.

Like her sources weren't all that well-cited to begin with, i.e. she cites the first three paragraphs but not the fourth? Or that while she barely changes a paragraph, it WAS changed at least a litte bit, so it's not plagarism?

Or is it also that Coulter writes in such a simplistic and poor manner that any conservative idea ever published comes out as plagarism according to a computer? (In which case she is a hack instead of a plagarist)

Does your evidence include the articels she's written over the years, which included very little evidence, or the excerpts from her book, which garnered a great deal of coverage?

And, most of all: their are other popular anti-plagarism programs out there. Why hasn't one of them been used and the results published?

[flowomo]

12. I'm in the MSM (a very tiny corner of it)

and my professional judgement based on what I have seen is that it does not rise to the level of plagiarism. But this only refers to the material introduced in the recent controversy.

I bet people have run every word Coulter has written through the "other popular" programs -- because lots of people would love to nail her ass. If they'd found anything, you'd know it.

Of course she's sloppy. She's a fucking hack with a talent for cleverly wording venom.

[Nevernose]

15. I don't know...

...if I'd go so far as to use the word "cleverly." Maybe "effective," but not "clever."
:)

[flowomo]

16. I'll go with that.

[kevinbgoode]

9. It was not a weak case, in my opinion. . .

there were examples in which she really did lift information word for word (except ONE or TWO words) in the exact order, without attribution. No excuse for that at all. The Portland Press Herald example was pretty much a textbook case of plagiarism. No attribution, nearly word-for-word statements as reported by the source.

[flowomo]

14. and your opinion is as good as mine.

I mean that sincerely. I'm just explaining what my judgement would have been.

[MADem]

11. FRAGMENTS?? I saw twenty four exact words in a row....

On more than one quote. Now, I dunno about you, but any phrase that takes twenty four words, I can probably find a way to REPHRASE it....

Here's Coulter from Chapter 1 of Godless: The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct.

Here's the Portland Press Herald, from the year 2000, in its list of the "Maine Stories of the Century": The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct.....

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2006/06/because-some-things-are-more-profane.html

Is Coulter committing plagiarism? Well, according to every definition of plagiarism - the use of ideas that are not your own without attribution - it sure seems like it. Hell, let's check out what Coulter's alma mater, Cornell University, says about plagiarism: In addition to direct quotation, it's "where you reproduce part or all of someone else’s idea in your own words (commonly known as paraphrasing), where you use or summarize someone else’s research, where you use facts or data that are not common knowledge, where you reproduce source material in slightly altered form while retaining the main idea or structure. Both direct and indirect citations require proper documentation."
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2006/06/more-ann-coulter-plagiarism-updated.html

The seventh chapter of "Godless: The Church of Liberalism" is devoted to "the left's war on science," which - according to Coulter - includes attacking and lying about "the science that is working" so as "to elevate the science that has produced nothing."

"In the August 24, 2004, New York Times, science writer Gina Kolata claimed that no one had succeeded in using adult stem cells 'to treat diseases,'" writes Coulter.

To prove the Times science writer wrong, Coulter then provides a "short list" of sixteen "successful treatments achieved by adult stem cell research."

But fifteen of Coulter's examples are nearly identical to a longer list of seventeen compiled by the Illinois Right To Life website, which has been available since at least September of 2003 (current link, archived 9/03 link)......For these fifteen items, Coulter appears to do little more than remove the parentheses and slightly change a word or two, such as "using" into "with."

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/For_new_book_Coulter_cribs_adult_0613.html

You can paraphrase ANYTHING, quote ANYONE, go mad, wild, crazy....so LONG AS YOU FOOTNOTE!!!!!

Otherwise, it's CHEATING!!!!!!!

[flowomo]

13. there is no "footnote" requirement in this kind of book....

academics and scholars footnote -- popular writers often don't. I'm a columnist; I don't footnote (though I scrupulously credit information when it is not generally known). The cases you cite are references to facts -- not "ideas." She didn't steal any "ideas" from the P-H story. And the reason the dam was shut down was part of the public record. The wording was inconsequential. How else would you say it?

As for the Illinois Right to Life thing -- please, you think THEY researched that? It was more likely a widely circulated pro-life talking point.

I would love to see Coulter nailed once and for all -- but this isn't going to do it.

[MADem]

19. Well, if I want to talk about something that happened eighty seven years

back, when our ancestors created a fresh, free country that believed in equality, and I started talking about four score and seven years ago, when our fathers brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...I think Mistah Lincoln would have a reason to be irritated.

She fucking COPIED. Word-for-word.

If those are your standards, well...those are your standards.

They aren't mine.

[flowomo]

21. sure... Lincoln labored over that elegant phrasing....

the lines you cite are leadfooted reportage of public information. Coulter isn't entirely in the clear on all this -- she skated near the edge. But this is not enough to stop her -- and that has become obvious since a few left groups are howling over it but everyone else has moved on. When a plagiarism case is clear -- and there have been many involving writers and journalists in recent years, left and right, the writer is usually done for.

[MADem]

22. Howling? No one is howling. Howling is what you heard when those

Swiftboat fuckers went after Kerry. What this is, is nothing more than BASIC QUESTIONING.

This assclown is getting A PASS. A PASS they wouldn't give Robert Caro or Doris Kerns Goodwin.

Like I said, your standards are NOT MINE. If I am going to rip off twenty or more words, verbatim, from someone else, then I am gonna attribute.

But that's just me, I guess.

[flowomo]

25. awww... I don't want to get into a fight with you.

Just a swap of opinions. But you suggest that only liberals get slammed when they plagiarize. Not so. Here's one good recent case:

Post.com Blogger Quits Amid Furor
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006; Page C01

A 24-year-old conservative blogger hired by The Washington Post Co.'s Web site resigned yesterday, three days after his debut, amid a flurry of allegations of plagiarism.

Ben Domenech, an editor with Regnery Publishing, relinquished the part-time position hours after a liberal Web site posted evidence that he had plagiarized part of a movie review he wrote for National Review Online. Previous allegations of plagiarism in Domenech's writing for the College of William & Mary student newspaper surfaced Wednesday, but the 2001 review was the first instance found since he attended the college.

[MADem]

28. Here's the funny thing--I don't like it no matter who does it.

And I don't believe it is just conservatives, or any particular group, that are lazy, cheating bastards. It's an epidemic, everywhere.

With all the fancy crapola they have with WORD and other writing programs, it is SO EASY to footnote nowadays. It's IDIOT PROOF. You don't even have to physically plan your page set-up, the programs do it FOR you.

Try footnoting back in the old days, on a manual goddamn typewriter, without a correcting ribbon either (and White Out being brand spanking new). If you forgot to leave space for the damn thing, you had to type the page all over again. Pain in the ass.

This isn't a liberal/conservative thing. It's a scholarly thing, a DECENT thing.

It's just wrong to make like the words of others are your own, if you KNOW for certain they aren't. And it takes NO time to either footnote, or, if ya don't want yer text cluttered, to endnote.

Just CREDIT the people who did the hard work. That's fair.

[kevinbgoode]

33. Coulter DID footnote - just no citations for examples like this

and as an educator, she would have been failed. Moreover, she did lift the idea in the P-H case - if she had pulled it from the public record, then it would have been a statement of fact. If the P-H had reported it incorrectly, for example, and had to correct it the following day and Ms. Coulter didn't catch it, then she wouldn't have been reporting fact at all - she would have been copying an IDEA of the fact. The publication of anything originally written is an idea - the writer for the P-H put that idea together. Coulter lifted that from the P-H instead of the original source. Non-attribution is a manner in which to prevent facts from being checked for authenticity.

There has been an issue with a local columnist who loves to do things like copy and paste quotes from articles outside the newspaper, only never attributing them to the writer or to the original article. As it turns out, it's a rather interesting way for him to CHANGE a direct quote to fit his point, and makes it a rather difficult way for editors and readers to check it, since no one has a clue without doing a google search where the quote or information came from originally.

[thinkingwoman]

35. I'm a recovering journalist, editor, and publisher

and if I'd had a reporter copy something word for word without citation, I would have fired them.

The wording is never inconsequential.

As for the exact merits of these recent examples, I'd need more research before forming a firm opinion. But on the surface it looks like words were copied, not ideas.

Just my 2 pennies.

[kevinbgoode]

37. I agree. . .

and my training was that if you don't attribute something that is copied...or even the idea, they YOU are responsible if it is wrong. The whole point of attribution is to help establish accuracy and to verify that someone just didn't pull an idea, or the work, out of their ass or some crazy person. . .

Like I cited in another example, I caught one of my local wingnut columnists not only with no attribution, but rather easily CHANGING a direct QUOTE to strengthen his "point". . .and of course not saying where he copied the quote.

[Eric J in MN]

18. These are just biref factual statements. NT

NT

[MADem]

20. Twenty four words long, and then some. Brief, factual? Please. NT

[MGKrebs]

39. Interesting. I'm not sure I see it.

"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."

33 words in the original. Can't change about 18 of them because they form the facts of the situation being described including names of things.Then we have "the", and "a", which make up 5 more words. Can't be a problem using a few of those. That makes 23. Then there are "on", "in", "was", "by", "of", and "to be". Surely these aren't the basis for a plagarism case. 29. Only 4 words left. Massive, halted, discovery, previously.

I'm not saying she didn't copy it. It's just that the language and phrasing is so common and so basic, it would be hard to avoid sounding just like that.

Is a reporter supposed to find another way to say " Two soldiers were killed when an IED exploded near their vehicle" or attribute it to someone?
I think I have already heard "The Braves bullpen blew another save last night" about 25 times this season, from multiple sources!



Would this be OK without attribution?

A giant hydroelectric project proposed for the upper St. John River in Maine called the Dickey-Lincoln Dam, which cost $227 million, was halted after someone discovered a plant previously believed to be extinct, the Furbish lousewort.

[Eric J in MN]

17. She's awful but the plagiarism charge was bogus.

In a book, there were some passages about 24 words each in which most but not all of the words were taken from somewhere else without attribution. And the sentences were just stating facts, not using clever phrases or anything.

[MADem]

23. So, if it isn't clever, it isn't plagiarism?

Bull. How hard is it to footnote, to quote, to credit, to attribute?

If you lift ANYONE's dull, pedestrian, shitty, lousy turn of phrase and thought, then you have to credit them.

She didn't. She is wrong.

[Eric J in MN]

24. Yes, it would be preferable if she had put it a footnote.

But 24 words in a book isn't a lot, and they weren't even exactly the same.

[MADem]

26. Isn't that about what they nailed Goodwin for? A Paragraph??

A thought? A passage? An idea??? What's good for the historian is good for the drunken cretin, after all...

http://hnn.us/articles/622.html

It seems that well-known historian and Harvard University Overseer Doris Kearns Goodwin consulted many sources while writing her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, but regrettably, one resource she did not consult was the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Handbook for Students. If she had, she would have been reminded that, “Students should always take great care to distinguish their own ideas and knowledge from information derived from sources…Whenever ideas or facts are derived from a student’s reading and research or from a student’s own writings, the sources must be indicated…Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, and ordinarily required to withdraw from the College.”

Goodwin’s plagiarism of sentences, nearly verbatim, from source materials is inexcusable. As an Overseer, Goodwin is a leader of an academic community, the foundation of which is integrity in independent scholarship. As a leader, she should recognize that her action is unbecoming an Overseer and resign her post immediately, sending the clear message to the campus that she understands the gravity of the offense she has committed.

If this were one accidental case of incorrect citation, the situation may warrant a different response. But as Goodwin herself has recognized, the unattributed use of sources goes far beyond borrowing isolated phrases from Lynne McTaggart’s Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, as Goodwin originally claimed, but rather involved many more uncited works.

Even though the plagiarism was apparently unintentional, Goodwin’s gross negligence—losing primary works, not checking citations before publication—constitutes the lack of respect and appreciation of others’ work that cannot be condoned by anyone who purports to be a model for the Harvard community. ...

[Eric J in MN]

27. The plagiarism charge against Doris Kearns Goodiwn is more bogus...

...because Goodwin DID footnote the paragraphs in question.

[MADem]

29. Yeah, and that is why she paid a settlement to the ORIGINAL author

She ADMITS she fucked up, and she now uses the COMPUTER to cite her notes:

Somehow in this process, a few of the books were not fully rechecked. I relied instead on my notes, which combined direct quotes and paraphrased sentences. If I had had the books in front of me, rather than my notes, I would have caught mistakes in the first place and placed any borrowed phrases in direct quotes. ... I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again. But the real miracle occurred when my college-age son taught me how to use the mysterious footnote key on the computer, which makes it possible to insert the citations directly into the text while the sources are still in front of me, instead of shuffling through hundreds of folders four or five years down the line, trying desperately to remember from where I derived a particular statistic or quote.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,197614,00.html


Historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin yesterday said she reached a private settlement several years ago with an author who had complained that she was not sufficiently credited for passages that Goodwin included in her 1987 book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys."
The settlement, agreed to after Lynne McTaggart contacted Goodwin to say that at least three passages from "Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times" were used almost verbatim in Goodwin's book, resulted in new footnotes and an expanded preface to a later edition of "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys."
It also involved a monetary settlement, Goodwin acknowledged, though she would not say how much. "The whole understanding was supposed to be confidential just because of the nature of it," Goodwin said in a telephone interview..... http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?Ver=1&Exp=06-22-2002&VAULT=1&FMT=FT&DID=000000101358052&REQ=1&Cert=Jv8be6QKZG%2bfAMB%2biFX8Wj4DXpYkOU1AO1aG4%2fKnzaMfKl1mk4TscANfbwcfe7OeWVLZLeRDWGNwdM0In7%2b%2b7w--&cfc=1

....

[Eric J in MN]

32. The law is on the side of people claiming copyright infringrment.

Copyright laws were written for the sake of the copyright holder, not to protect people whose only error is failing to put quotation marks around short phrases from a cited author.

In music, artists have been successfully sued for using a sample which lastsa few seconds.

[western mass]

30. W Churchill's plagiarism - 1 paragraph

There were other bogus charges, of course, but the only thing that could really be called "plagiarism" amounted to what's been cited for Coulter above.

[MADem]

31. But Goodwin's were NOT bogus, that is a canard. She PAID cash

money, acknowledged error, AND changed the book.

You don't DO that when the charges are "bogus."

And we'll see if the original authors step forward. They just may. There's a payday there.

[kevinbgoode]

38. I agree...looks like a double standard to me.

I've been told before that in opinion columns, the citations aren't necessary because it's just an opinion. . .which is interesting, because too many wingnut columnists develop "opinions" about something that is truthiness, and repeat the gossip as fact without attribution.

[kevinbgoode]

34. I agree...if you don't pull the fact from an original source

it has to be attributed - otherwise it could be nothing more than repeating unsubstantiated gossip.

[Erika]

2. Do the google it's there

Coultergeist is becoming a has been. Finally.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. Universal Press Syndicate said "nothing to see here" but...

"John Barrie, the creator of a leading plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three instances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blond pundit's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book's text through the company's digital iThenticate program," writes Philip Recchia.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Paper_confirms_Coulter_plagiarism_0702.html

Google "Coulter plagiarism John Barrie" (without the quotes)

and now her column is being dropped from one paper, and others are considering it too.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20060713_paper_coulter_column/

[sakabatou]

6. Thanks

[madrchsod]

7. check the posts by the rude pundit

he`s been on her case for over a year now...she`s a serial plagiarizer. if she tried that bullshit in college she`d be thrown out.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/
The Rude Pundit

scroll down to 7-10 then down from there...the rude one won`t be denied!

[Goat or Panic]

8. Try the Daily Howler too

It wasn't just her current book and columns, these accusations go back a couple of years.
Also try scoobiedavis.blogspot.com

[DFLer4edu]

36. check out this link to top ten conservative idiots

idiot #25 http://journals.democraticunderground.com/top10/250 but she's not really a plagiarist, she's just not a scholar