Posted on 01/07/2017 4:24:26 PM PST by usafa92
An investigation by CNN’s K-File has found that Trump advisor Monica Crowley, who the president-elect has tapped for a senior communications role on his national security team, plagiarized many parts of her 2012 bestseller, What The (Bleep) Just Happened? The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback. CNN discovered and documented more than 50 instances where Crowley, a former Fox News contributor and syndicated radio host and columnist, had lifted passages or phrases — some wholesale — from a variety of sources including Wikipedia, think tank websites, and news articles and op-ed columns from numerous publications like the National Review, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many others.
The Trump transition team defended Crowley in a statement to CNN and called the allegation — which CNN backs up with essentially irrefutable side-by-side comparisons — a “politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country,” insisting that Crowley’s “exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the [Trump] Administration.”
CNN was unable to get a response regarding the discovery from either Crowley or her book’s publisher, HarperCollins. Crowley is currently set to become Trump’s senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. She was previously accused of plagiarizing part of a Wall Street Journal column she wrote in 1999, an allegation she denied.
Harvard Guide to Using Sources wherein it is stated:
In academic writing , it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper
And so there you have it -stated boldly - in academic writing.
Crowley's book is not academic writing. The standard to be applied is the usual standard of copyright infringement, not the academic standard of plagiarism.
That is exactly the point. She did not copy her arguments about how Obama is expropriating the product of American exceptionalism, redistributing it to the third world and undermining the source of American wealth and power from another book and pass it off as hers.
And that is exactly the point. CNN hates her for it. But to criticize her for what she said, they would have to repeat what she said which would convince others that her views are valid. So they accuse her of plagiarizing, which is an academic standard, not a legal one. It is not theft of intellectual property to quote a view without citation and then criticize it. Criticism is a category under fair use, and you cannot accuse here of seeking to profit from a stolen idea which she holds up to scorn and ridicule.
The real problem is that the left is attempting to use "plagiarism" to squelch political speech.
Well, the first question to ask is what is "it." As KC Burke points out, Biden stole whole passages and passed it off as his idea - his view of the world.
Crowley is "stealing" ideas and them working them over pretty thoroughly as things we don't want to do.
Now, if as in the case of Biden, there is an idea that she claimed was original with her, something central to her argument that she stole from someone else and passed off as hers without attribution, like Biden did, then she is rightly criticized. But if the criticism is that her political screed lacks 2 inches of heft because it is shy 200 footnotes x 17 chapters, well, that is a blessing not a curse in many circles.
CNN, the least trusted news network.
Which is a FAAAAAAAAAAR worse thing; yet the Dems never cared one whit about that.
Welcome to that club! :-)
Exactly. The standard she must me as an author is not to infringe copyright, after taking into consideration fair use for, purposes of criticism - and there is no denying that her criticism is harsh. The citation standards of the Yale faculty are irrelevant, and yet CNN has swindled many here into accepting that as the standard to be applied.
Now do they aspire to be governed by the Yale faculty? In fact the Ivy League is noteworthy that as their academic standards have become stricter, their reputation for intellectual productivity and value has declined. They are both symptoms of hardening of the intellectual arteries, substitution of procedural rules for creative thought.
Don’t listen to what she says is Wong with Obama - her explanation of Keynesian economics lacks the proper footnote. Boil her in oil - no acid.
Exactly. The standard she must me as an author is not to infringe copyright, after taking into consideration fair use for, purposes of criticism - and there is no denying that her criticism is harsh. The citation standards of the Yale faculty are irrelevant, and yet CNN has swindled many here into accepting that as the standard to be applied.
Now do they aspire to be governed by the Yale faculty? In fact the Ivy League is noteworthy that as their academic standards have become stricter, their reputation for intellectual productivity and value has declined. They are both symptoms of hardening of the intellectual arteries, substitution of procedural rules for creative thought.
Don’t listen to what she says is Wong with Obama - her explanation of Keynesian economics lacks the proper footnote. Boil her in oil - no acid.
both micheal and nobama have used other people SS # and nobama has lifted most of another persons birth certificate...now whose complaining about what?
please please please someone release the records, all the correct records on that SOB when he leaves for Gods sake! Such a lying imposter!
I’m not defending it. My opinion of someone who would regurgitate Wikipedia in a “book” and put a price tag on it is low, if indeed it is as bad as CNN alleges, which I would not be so sure of because I don’t trust them.
But I’ve got to say I don’t give a flying damn if an adviser who wrote a book plagiarized or not, and I wouldn’t care if an adviser to a democrat President did either. Pretty pathetic attempt by CNN to try to tarnish the incoming administration. This is what they spend their time “investigating”? ANYTHING no matter no trivial, ANYTHING to embarrass the President-elect.
99.9% of readers don't have time to wade through CNN's list of 50 "Smoking Gun" alleged plagiarisms to verify for themselves, and CNN damn well knows it.
Whenever leftist accusers present a huge laundry list of conservative transgressions, it only makes sense that they'd place the most damning examples at the top, right? So if you want to verify it for yourself, start with the topmost one, research it, then work your way down the list until you run out of time or a pattern of True or False emerges, whichever comes first.
Let's do that with the very topmost item on CNN's list - the Crowley / Klein / Reuters accusation:
CNN hopes you'll ONLY compare Crowley's wording versus Klein's wording, and forget all about the original source they BOTH quoted from.
NOTE that CNN doesn't quote the original Reuter's article. Why? It took me 10 seconds to find the original Reuters article right here by googling 4 words: Reuters Adbusters Soros Tunisia.
EXHIBIT A in the public trial of Monica Crowley:
I don't feel any need to move on to Exhibit B or further, if this is CNN's most damning evidence of plagiarism.
Second, far too much is made of plagiarism. The exact crime of plagiarism is stealing someone else’s work, taking someone else’s original ideas . And so for it to be plagiarism she must be passing off as her ideas, ideas that were actually original with the person accusing her of plagiarism.
Plagiarism is stealing someone else’s intellectual property. Not just big ideas. Exact phrases that clearly are lifted from someone else’s writing. She’s smart. There was no reason for her to do this.
Like you said, you can quote and footnote others’ words and ideas all day, as long as you forthrightly give them their credit.
She impresses me greatly. That doesn’t change that she plagiarized and it’s a crime of low ethics. She should be above it. She should be honest. But she wasn’t.
I agree with you. She should apologize and withdraw those passages BECAUSE she is the honest, smart, wise commentator we believe her to be. If she does not, she becomes a fake and doesn’t deserve our respect. It’s bad enough that she’s gone this long.
In a circumstance, that you are given an advance on a book ....and at some point, you have deadlines to meet ....you cut corners.
I have no insight into how this whole business works, ges sayin’ is all. :)
False. As an orthodox Jew, Jared Kushner would never touch a Pigtail.
Now maybe a ponytail but I think that ponies might also be “treif” (non-Kosher). /sarc and luvin’ it
Though I don't have her book - nearly 400 pages long BTW, Amazon has a lot of pages from it excerpted here.
I don't believe she uses one footnote anywhere in the book. But as you pointed out, this is not a doctoral dissertation or any other kind of scholarly publication from an Ivy League school.
Occasionally she gives attributions such as this on p. 90: "As economic writer John Crudele has repeatedly pointed out, if a project were truly shovel-ready....." That's it. No citation of the exact page# or even a publication name for the Crudele source material. Just his name and a paraphrase of his thoughts.
But should we really care as much as CNN does that she's chosen to write an advocacy book that cites tons of facts, figures and quotes to support her assertions, and all without a single footnote?
CNN's single largest excerpt of her book by far is of Page 91-92, where the long bulleted list of Pork Barrel items appears. As usual, she gives no attribution for it. But tell me this: Can any sane person reading through this footnote-less book arrive at that page, view that long detailed list of $ amounts, notice that there's no attribution for it, and conclude that, "Oh my! Since there's no footnote or other attribution here, Monica must have created this extensive list of Pork Barrel items all on her own! What a fantastic researcher to have spent the time to read millions of pages of Fed Govt documents to find all of these all on her own!!"
Would that be a reasonable conclusion for any reader?? Come on people! Everyone who buys her books has seen many versions of this list and others similar to it, going back to at least the 1970s .... the Pentagon's wasteful boondoggles, Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, etc. Is there a shred of evidence that by her presenting this list in this way, she is cynically trying to take credit for someone else's words as her own? Ludicrous!
It's obvious that when she wants to find a fact / figure / quote / anecdote to buttress some assertion of hers, she searches the web, places the found article in front of her, and tries to paraphrase the facts contained therein with her own words. Sometimes the original quotes are not completely paraphrased by her, leaving in a lot of the original words, though usually only in short bursts that are interspersed with her own paraphrasing. And obviously in a nearly 400 page book, the CNN Hit Squad is going to find a number of these, merely by running that app sold to college profs to search the web for unattributed quotes and even entire purloined essays turned in by their students.
And one of CNN's longest items is for that old story of Churchill we've all heard numerous times re, "Would you sleep with me for this much? ... etc etc ... We're now just negotiating the price". How many times has that story been put in print? Does anyone know what the original source for that story was? How many of the places you find this story on the web have properly attributed the story to the original source? And can you even prove that?
That's another thing about using the web for attributions. Any book is going to take 10 to 100 times as long to write if you insist on tracking down the original source of each quote to some paper version of a book or magazine or newspaper sitting in a library, and insist on seeing it with your own eyes.
Because anything short of that, ie anything that you get by copy/paste from a website, is instantly suspect and far, far less reliable. URL's / links disappear all the time, unlike things made of paper sitting in libraries. Again & again when you follow someone's link to what they claim is the original article they're quoting from, the link is broken.
And again & again when you're tracking down an exact quote, you'll get 1 to 3 copies of the original article (depending on how many magazines/blogs/etc the author posts it on), and dozens of other websites that quote it, and hundreds of ones that re-quote from the dozens. And you'll notice that quite a few of those websites which quote verbatim large sections of the original text through that marvelous method known as copy/paste, will neglect to state where they got the text from. So if an author happens to turn up one of the un-attributed copies of what they're looking for, and they stop there instead of further searching for copies that ARE attributed, then they could easily assume the attribution is lost.
Well anyway, just my 2 cents (times a couple hundred!) worth.
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