Editors' note: The debacle that occurred this past week with the hiring and subsequent resignation of Ben Domenech at blogspot.washingtonpost.com brings the issue of plagiarism to the fore once more. We've dusted off an early and previously unpublished ePluribus Media story, written before we even had a public website, that focused on the practice of Jeff Gannon and Talon News staff of "lifting" other writers' work.
It is a refresher on what plagiarism is and a call to those plagiarized to stand up for their unique rights to the product of their creativity.
An ePluribus Media piece Citizen Journalism Priority: Avoiding Plagiarism in Research and Writing provides clear guidelines of how to avoid plagiarism.
As bombs dropped, missiles landed, bullets flew and tanks rolled into Iraq three years ago, accredited journalists embedded in American military units sent reports home to a news-hungry public.
Those reporters adorned their stories with datelines — Baghdad, Kuwait, “Somewhere in Iraq” — to show that they had actually been on the front lines. Covering the Iraq War is a braver business than the public realizes. According to Reporters Without Borders, some 55 journalists have been killed there, a death toll much higher than in other recent wars.
As real reporters risked their lives to gather news, something very different happened within Talon News Service, an invention of GOPUSA, a partisan group with close ties to George W. Bush’s Texas backers.
Jim Hauser was busy stealing the words coming in from Iraq. Talon’s writer sat thousands of miles from the battlefield, had taken no personal risk and had generated none of the material for his story, but Talon released his report under a Baghdad dateline.
Talon published the fabrication on April 8, 2003. Only five days earlier, a real American journalist — Michael Kelly, a magazine editor and Washington Post columnist — had lost his life in Iraq. He left a wife and two children.
“The missiles were discovered by Marines with the 101st Airborne Division, which was following up behind the Army after it seized Baghdad’s international airport,” the Talon report stated.
Hauser lifted that section from a Reuters article. He took other parts from a Fox News/Associated Press report and GlobalSecurity.org. The 263-word fabrication, “Chemical Tipped Missile Found in Baghdad,” contained no original reporting by Talon staff.
Plagiarism has always been an occupational hazard in the high-pressure news business, but it is treated harshly when discovered. Within the past three years, plagiarists have been dismissed from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and USA Today, among others, and prominent apologies issued.
But at Talon News, plagiarism and other forms of misrepresentation and outright lying were core GOPUSA values, rampant from top to bottom. Plagiarism went hand-in-hand with another sort of deception — propaganda, the presentation of one-sided, agenda-driven material under the guise of news.
Talon’s most famous “reporter,” James Dale Guckert, 47, working under the alias Jeff Gannon, managed to combine plagiarism and propaganda so blatantly that, after a widely reported incident in January, the GOPUSA operation gained national attention.
"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines,” Guckert said to President Bush at a White House news conference on January 26, 2005. “How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"
In fact, Reid had never mentioned soup lines. Guckert had stolen the lie from right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh’s Internet site.
Guckert, along with others at Talon, often converted opinion into news with unattributed sections of White House press releases. He has since defended the deception as a means of providing his right-wing readers with direct access to the Bush administration’s version of events.
“Yes. I did that,” Guckert told a panel of bloggers who gathered at the National Press Club in April. “Why? Because I was about the only news source that was providing that information without a filter. … There is nothing wrong with reporting what the administration says about a particular issue.”
The other half of Talon’s output was slanted in some fashion, including some material also lifted from press releases. Every slanted article was slanted toward the right wing, not a matter of particular surprise given that GOPUSA, Talon’s parent, defines its mission as to “spread the conservative message throughout America.”
Talon archives reveal propaganda at every turn, including material from Bobby Eberle, the organization’s president and CEO. In one case, Eberle turned press releases from a Republican congressman and a right-wing political group into “news” running under his byline.
“Tancredo said he was surprised to learn of the ‘incredible success that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers enjoyed in apprehending smugglers attempting to illegally smuggle 150 Lilac Crowned and Mexican Redhead Amazon Parrots in the United States,” Eberle wrote in one such fabrication, which duplicated the tone and wording of a press release issued by a Republican congressman.
“Congressman Tom Tancredo (CO-06) today was surprised to learn of the incredible success that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers enjoyed in apprehending smugglers attempting to illegally smuggle 150 Lilac Crowned and Mexican Redhead Amazon Parrots in the United States,” the sarcastic press release said.
In another case, Guckert turned a press release issued by Fred Gedrich, a senior policy analyst at Freedom Alliance, a Washington policy group whose senior defense analyst contributes to the right-wing, cult-controlled Washington Times, into a faked interview.
The following day, a Talon News report under the Jeff Gannon byline reported, “Despite his own second-guessing, Kerry blasted ‘armchair generals’ who are criticizing the war plan.” The Talon article closely replicated other sections of Johnson’s report.
On June 13 of the same year, Melissa Beecher, a Boston reporter, covered the removal of a family’s home-schooled children for the purpose of giving them standardized achievement tests required in Massachusetts. Her article appeared in suburban publications The MetroWest Daily News and The Daily News Tribune.
“George Nicholas Bryant, 15, and Nyssa Bryant, 13, stood behind their parents, Kim and George, as police and DSS workers attempted to collect their children at 7:45 a.m. DSS demanded that the two complete a test to determine their educational level,” Beecher wrote.
Four days later, Guckert faked a report for Talon News.
“At 7:45 a.m. Thursday, DSS workers and police came to the Waltham, MA residence of George and Kim Bryant to transport the couple’s two children, George Nicholas, 15, and Nyssa, 13, to a hotel to administer a test to determine their education level,” Talon declared under the Jeff Gannon byline.
Other “Gannon” fabrications used material stolen from The New York Times, Associated Press, American Baptist Press, USA Today and The Yankton [S.D.] Daily Press & Dakotan.
Another Talon plagiarist, using the byline Steve Roeder, stole material from Fox News and The New York Times to produce a January 7, 2005, article titled, “Dems Fail in Ohio Electoral Vote Challenge.”
“The certification was delayed for several hours after Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, stopped the formal declaration of Bush’s second term to protest voting irregularities,” wrote a three-person team whose article appeared on Fox’s Web site the day before.
“Certification was halted for the majority of the afternoon when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) stopped the formal declaration process,” the Talon article under the Roeder name said.
When it came to plagiarism, Talon practiced what it did not preach. Talon News Service copyrighted its output and attached the standard legal notice, “All Rights Reserved,” to its articles, including stories that used stolen material.
On June 30, 2003, barely two months after Talon published Hauser’s stolen Iraq report, Eberle asserted Talon’s ownership of its output in a posting on the far-right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com. A contributor had posted an entire Talon article there, and a FreeRepublic administrator asked Eberle about it.
“Actually, any copyright protected material, such as columns and news stories on the GOPUSA Web site, should not be posted in their entirety without permission. It may be annoying to you, but it is the proper thing to do,” Eberle wrote in response. “GOPUSA and Talon News do a great job in covering (FreeRepublic’s) rallies and other activities. We respect what you are doing, and we ask that you respect us by adhering to basic copyright and fair use practices.”
FreeRepublic complied. “Thanks for posting that and (that is) why I asked that the full article be pulled to respect the copyright!” a FreeRepublic moderator wrote to Eberle. “Your site is great and want to do everything we can to help spread the word!”
Contributors: SusanG, Ron Brynaert, NYBri, Kiw, susie dow, sawcielackey, wanderindiana, kfred, luaptifer, Sue in KY, JeninRI, Maddy Houseman Sojourner, Sean Mykael, Ryan Fenno, standingup, Cho and Stoy
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