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NY Times Desperately Downplays Harris Plagiarism: 'Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages'
Breaking news from anti-DEI activist and Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo -- that Kamala Harris plagiarized five sections in her 2009 book Smart on Crime -- was greeted with contempt from the New York Times, which even hurled accusations of racism at Rufo for his past successes of exposing plagiarists in academia, including helping force the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay.
Yes, the Times put "seizes" in its dismissive headline:
Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book
A report by Christopher Rufo says the Democratic presidential nominee copied five short passages for her 2009 book on crime. A plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious.
The Times instantly mobilized three reporters, Stephanie Saul, Vimal Patel, and Dylan Freedman on the case to neutralize Rufo’s undeniable claims under a ridiculous deck of headlines, which used a liberal media cliché (“seizes”) and dismissed the findings, courtesy of Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber, as a nonstory.
Even the online photo caption tried to poison the findings as ideologically motivated, not a clear case of copying work: “Christopher Rufo is known for his opposition to diversity, inclusion and equity programs.”
Harris's boss Joe Biden has an extensive history of taking other people’s words as well, though most often in speeches, as our own Jeffrey Lord knows very well. The story began with a label:
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo published claims on Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris had copied portions of her 2009 book Smart on Crime, citing five sections that he said were lifted from widely available sites including Wikipedia and news reports.
The minimization of the scandal began immediately.
The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book. Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco.
In a review of the book, The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.
The five passages that Mr. Rufo cited appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.
Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.
“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.”
The Harris campaign in a statement rejected the accusations as a right-wing attack to try to derail her growing support.
“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the vice president clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” said James Singer, a campaign spokesman.
Known for his work opposing diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Mr. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, published plagiarism accusations last year that helped lead to the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.
First came the hints that Rufo was racist for exposing Harris’s plagiarism.
Mr. Rufo is part of a loose confederation of conservative writers and activists who, during the past year, have tried to expose plagiarism among academics, many of whom have been Black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion.
….
Mr. Rufo said that while he and his colleagues had examined mostly published work by white academics, plagiarism had shown up almost always among papers written by Black scholars, particularly Black women who work in diversity and inclusion.
Then came the direct accusations of racism.
Some academics, however, have characterized the campaign as racist.
Finally, the Times cited some examples of Harris plagiarism, though without any helpful graphics to highlight the similarities.
The paragraph reads: “The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.”
The news release [from John Jay College of Criminal Justice]: “The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35% reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20% citywide.”
By the way, the paper’s “plagiarism expert” Jonathan Bailey clearly resents conservatives for exposing plagiarism among leftist academic icons, telling the Times regarding Rufo’s expose of White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo last year, “It’s obviously got political and ideological motivations behind it, which is frustrating because as someone who takes plagiarism seriously, having it used as an ideological weapon is not encouraging….”
The paper was less forgiving of similar instances of plagiarism in a Ph.D. dissertation by conservative commentator and writer Monica Crowley in 2019, in a story after an investigation based on a 2017 Politico piece. No “seizing” or “pouncing” by hostile Democrats here; the headline simply read: “Columbia Inquiry Found Plagiarism in Monica Crowley’s Dissertation -- An investigation concluded that the Treasury Department’s top spokeswoman did not commit research misconduct, but required extensive revisions.”
Reporter Alan Rappeport quoted Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden grandstanding about the supposed seriousness of Crowley’s offense and how it reflected badly on the Trump administration, noting plagiarism was grounds for expulsion from college. But Wyden did not “seize,” and neither did he “pounce.”
Rappeport wrote: “Plagiarism at times has been a disqualifying offense in politics.”
But clearly not at the New York Times, not if you’re a Democratic presidential nominee three weeks before Election Day.
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