Saturday, January 7, 2017

Steal This Book, She Said

Former BuzzFeed News editor turned CNN Money investigative reporter Andrew Kaczynski is certainly leading off the network's new KFile project with a bang in 2017. Their first big scoop of the year turns out to be the fact that right-wing radio host and incoming Trump National Security Council mouthpiece Monica Crowley's 2012 book is chock-a-block with dozens of instances of plagiarism, some stolen wholesale from everyone from FOX News to the Mises Institute to National Review.

In the book, Crowley lifted an entire section on Keynesian economics from the IAC-owned website Investopedia.

In one instance, Crowley lists a variety of so-called "pork" items she claimed were part of the 2009 stimulus package. Many of the instances were copied wholesale from a conservative list of pork barrel spending, with some items dating back to the 1990s. Most of the copied instances were listed on a website for a podiatrist dating back to 2004.

A section on organized labor appears largely copied from a 2004 article by the libertarian think tank the Mises Institute. Another portion of her book on torture is copied from a Fox News article.

Sections of her book are repeatedly lifted from articles by National Review author Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a friend of Crowley’s. Lines in her book also match word-for-word the work of other columnists, including National Review’s Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, conservative economist Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View.

Crowley also lifted word-for-word phrases from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC, and Yahoo News.

Crowley has been accused of plagiarism before. In 1999, Slate reported a column by Crowley in the Wall Street Journal mirrored a 1988 article in Commentary, the neoconservative magazine.

"Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article," a Journal editor’s note said at the time. Crowley denied the charge at the time, saying, "I did not, nor would I ever, use material from a source without citing it."

Kacyznkisi brings his receipts, too, and includes all the instances he could find.

We're going to need more reporting like this, stuff where we remember that the leaders of this country and the people who work for them need to be held accountable.  Crowley should be let go, there's no way she can have a working relationship with the media as a spokesperson after stealing their work like this.

But we'll see who steps up to defender her among the right.

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