Posted on 04/07/2003 11:00:22 AM PDT by TonyInOhio
Like any number of webloggers trying to make their mark with commentary on the war in Iraq, Sean-Paul Kelley knew geography and career experience didn't favor him.
Kelley -- the man behind the wildly popular site The Agonist -- lives in Texas, worlds away from the war's front lines. And his reporting résumé added up to a mere three weeks at a local paper. Still, for the last few weeks, he had managed to post several dozen war-related news items a day on his site.
Some of the information was attributed to news outlets and other sources, but much of it was unsourced, particularly the almost real-time combat information presumably gleaned from a string of high-level sources worldwide.
Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek online and National Public Radio.
The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
"You got me, I admit it.... I made a mistake," Kelley said. "It was stupid."
In a series of interviews with Wired News, Kelley changed his story several times. At first, he said he used just four or five Stratfor items a day without crediting the company. Later, he owned up to "six or seven days when half was from Stratfor."
Aside from a few scattered attributions, Kelley presented Stratfor's intelligence as information he had uncovered himself, typically paragraph-long reports detailing combat operations in Iraq. He took these wholesale from a Stratfor proprietary newsletter, U.S.-Iraqwar.com, which Kelley admits he subscribes to.
"Many postings on the (Agonist) pages I looked at are word-for-word verbatim," said Stratfor chief analyst Matthew Baker.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
Kelley would have been better off visiting FreeRepublic. :-)
My thoughts exactly. I found my way over there about 10 days ago, following the glowing recommendations of the press. I can't recall seeing ANYTHING he posted that wasn't old news over here. And I'm not saying that as one of those "FR is the center of the universe" Freepers who seem to think there is no internet beyond these cyberwalls.
The only plus to a site like that compared to here is that the information is much more accessible at a blog. You don't have to wade through too much information. If you are pressed for time, this place can be a bit overwhelming.
I stuck around more for the comments from the hangers-on. Sometimes they were quite amusing, coming as they did mostly from the left.
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