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.
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.