Byron York: Plagiarism? Bloggers don’t seem to mind

Suppose a Democratic strategist wrote an open letter to colleagues and clients analyzing this week’s election returns. “Republicans have very little to cheer about this election,” he said with some satisfaction. “But off-year elections are rarely harbingers of future performance. Democrats actually did quite well in 2003, to little effect in 2004.”

Suppose further that the Democratic strategist signed his name to the letter and distributed it widely.

And then suppose one more thing: that the Democratic strategist had not actually written those words but had lifted them wholesale from a liberal blog. (In fact, those words do come from such a site, the influential dailykos.com.)

Might anyone suggest that the strategist had, uh, stolen those phrases? That he had committed plagiarism?

Change a few details and something very similar is going on now involving not a Democratic strategist but a member of Congress, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

This week the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Brown, a challenger for the seat of Ohio Republican Sen. Mike DeWine, sent a letter to DeWine criticizing Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

The problem with the letter, according to the Plain Dealer, was that it was copied almost verbatim from talking points posted on a left-wing blog.

For example, according to the paper, blogger Nathan Newman wrote on Nov. 1: “What is striking about Alito is that he is so hostile even to the basic rights of workers to have a day in court, much less interpreting the law in their favor.”

In his letter to DeWine, Sherrod wrote: “What is striking about Alito is that he is so hostile even to the basic rights of workers to have a day in court, not to mention interpreting the law against them.”

Beyond that, the paper reported that “Brown’s letter cited details of 13 rulings by Alito, who in early 2006 will face confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The problem is, Brown’s descriptions in 12 of the cases were almost verbatim to what Newman wrote on his blog.”

The answer is yes. Perhaps not the worst sort — after all, Brown’s letter was the sort of talking-points boilerplate that is seen on both sides of the aisle — but it did involve lifting material straight from an uncredited source.

Now, one might expect the liberal blogo-sphere to be at least slightly miffed to see a politician appropriating the remarks of one of their own.

Not at all. Instead, liberal bloggers — including the one whose work had been plagiarized — leaped to their fellow Democrat Sherrod’s defense.

“So a Sherrod Brown staffer used some lines from one of my blog posts,” wrote Newman. “Who frigging cares?”

The same held true at the Daily Kos. “Some dumbass reporter [for the Plain Dealer] accuses the Sherrod Brown campaign of plagiarizing Nathan Newman’s research on Alito’s labor record,” site founder Markos Moulitsas wrote. “While some bloggers obsess over copyright and getting ‘credit’ and shit like that, most of us are simply happy when our ideas and arguments gain wider currency.”

Even more striking was the opinion of the popular blogger known as Atrios, who in real life is Duncan B. Black, a senior fellow at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.

One might think that a media watchdog would be sensitive to such matters — after all, Media Matters was pretty hard on the disgraced reporter Jeff Gannon for, among other journalistic misdeeds, reprinting Republican National Committee talking points verbatim under his own name.

But the Brown letter was OK by Duncan Black. “Genuine plagiarism in this context is lifting out paragraphs of unique prose,” he wrote, “not culling some information from a blog post.”

On the other side of the argument, there were some, mostly conservatives, who pointed out that plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as your own, and the Brown letter seemed to fit that definition.

And there was, of course, the partisan argument: If a Republican had selectively lifted the words of a liberal blogger and presented them as his own in a political argument, would that be similarly OK with Newman, Moulitsas, Black and their allies?

Now, this is not a capital offense. But politicians have been hit for plagiarism before — you might want to ask Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) about that.

And the fact that bloggers want their work to gain maximum exposure does not allow someone else to take their work and present it as his own.

In defending Brown, Moulitsas pointed out a disclaimer at the bottom of the Daily Kos: “Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified.”

That’s a good thing, because Moulitsas in no way approved the use of his words, attributed to a Democratic strategist, at the beginning of this column.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com

Even more striking was the opinion of the popular blogger known as Atrios, who in real life is Duncan B. Black, a senior fellow at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.
One might think that a media watchdog would be sensitive to such matters — after all, Media Matters was pretty hard on the disgraced reporter Jeff Gannon for, among other journalistic misdeeds, reprinting Republican National Committee talking points verbatim under his own name.

Hmmm... Media Matters... where have I heard that before?...

... Another of CAP’s missions is to carry out “rapid response” to what it calls conservative “attacks” in the media. CAP’s Web site promises that it will soon be capable of “responding effectively and rapidly to conservative proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives.” To this end, CAP offers a stable of talking heads – coiffed, credentialed and fully briefed – ready to appear at a moment’s notice on national talk shows to interrupt, side track, browbeat and otherwise prevent conservative commentators from getting their message out.
Notable among CAP’s line-up of talking heads are The Nation’s Eric Alterman – who claims expertise on the subjects of media and democracy – and Morton H. Halperin, who offers to speak on national security.
CAP helped launch Media Matters for America, a 501(c)(03) public charity better known for its Web site MediaMatters.org, which opened for business on May 3, 2004. Inasmuch as Media Matters aspires to serve as a media watchdog, monitoring “rightwing” journalists for errors and ethical violations, it is odd, to say the least, that David Brock has been appointed its President and CEO. Brock is a former conservative journalist who defected to the Left amidst an outpouring of dramatic public apologies and confessions that he had built his career on lies, writing political hit pieces filled with flimsy evidence and outright fabrications. Even so, whatever Brock lacks in credibility, he more than makes up for in the quality of his schmoozing. Brock told The New York Times that he conferred with Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle and former Vice President Al Gore before launching his Web site.[7]
The New York Times, which generously provided a 1,041-word feature article to announce Brock’s grand opening, reports that, “Mr. Brock's project was developed with help from the newly formed Center for American Progress…. [CAP president John] Podesta has loaned office space in the past to Mr. Brock and introduced him to potential donors.” Brock received $2 million for the start-up. His donors include friend-of-Hillary Susie Tompkins Buell, co-founder of the fashion company Esprit; former cable TV mogul Leo Hindery Jr.; and San Francisco philanthropist James C. Hormel, an enthusiastic promoter of the “gay lifestyle” whom Clinton appointed ambassador to Luxembourg in the 1990s.[8]
In its short life, Media Matters has already acquired a reputation for zombie-like partisanship and reckless disregard for the truth. Brock and his team seem to sleepwalk through their work, rubberstamping, with mind-numbing monotony, virtually every conservative utterance that finds its way into major media as a “lie,” a “smear,” a “slander,” or a factual “error.”
War on Rush Limbaugh
Among Brock’s high-priority projects is a campaign to pressure Congress and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to ban Rush Limbaugh from American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) – thus depriving our troops in Iraq of one of the few radio programs they are allowed to hear that wholeheartedly supports them and the cause for which they fight. Only one hour of Limbaugh’s three-hour show is broadcast on one of AFRTS’s thirteen radio channels, five days per week – constituting less than one percent of the network’s total weekly programming. [9] Nevertheless, that is one percent too many for the Shadow Party and its operatives.
Shortly after Media Matters began its campaign, Democrat Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa obligingly proposed an amendment to the 2005 Defense Authorization Act mandating “political balance” on AFRTS. The Senate approved Harkin’s amendment unanimously on June 16. It stops short of banning Limbaugh outright, but the amendment effectively requires AFRTS to balance Limbaugh with more leftwing commentary. Given the fact that one of the network’s two news channels currently airs National Public Radio 24 hours per day, seven days per week, it is hard to imagine how AFRTS can broadcast more leftwing commentary than it already does.[10] Even so, Senator Harkin complained in a June 17 Senate speech, “[T]here is no commentary on the service that would even begin to balance the extreme right-wing views that Rush Limbaugh routinely expresses on his program.” [11]---------- "The Shadow Party: Part II Continued : Center for American Progress (CAP)," By David Horowitz and Richard Poe FrontPageMagazine.com, October 7, 2004

Atrios

American Dr. Duncan B. Black, known under his internet publishing pseudonym as Atrios, is the author of the popular liberal weblog Eschaton, which receives an average of over 100,000 hits per day. On June 29, 2005, Atrios, reacting to possible Federal Election Commission regulations that he feared would impinge upon bloggers' right to support and solicit donations to political candidates, redesignated Eschaton, without change of content, "An Online Magazine of News, Commentary, and Editorial," rather than a blog. Atrios is also a regular commentator on Air America Radio's The Majority Report. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and their cats Wiley and Gizmo, whose pictures he often features on Eschaton.

He holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He previously worked at the London School of Economics, the Université catholique de Louvain, the University of California at Irvine, and recently, Bryn Mawr College. Black is now a Senior Fellow at the media research group, Media Matters for America.

For a long time Atrios, who apparently emerged from the Internet forums of The WELL, remained pseudonymous and joked that he was actually a high school gym teacher. However, during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, he revealed that he had accepted a job at Media Matters for America and allowed his name and photo to be published. Black later said that he blogged psuedononymously as an academic to avoid attacks like those unleashed on Timothy Shortell.[1]

According to Black, the name "Atrios" is actually a (misspelled) reference to a character named Antrios in the play Art, who paints the central "white painting on white canvas" in the play.

Duncan B. Black aka Atrios photo below...

http://www.indepundit.com/archive2/atrios4.jpg

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