The New Republic (6/12/14) looks at Chris Hedges.
One reaction I’ve seen to the accusations of plagiarism against Chris Hedges is, basically: Who cares?
It’s true there are greater journalistic crimes than plagiarism. When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed. Plagiarism has never started a war, as far as I can tell.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a serious matter, at least for the journalistic community. It’s a matter of workplace theft.
Imagine that you wait tables in a restaurant, and one of your co-workers turns out to have a habit of picking up other people’s tips when he thinks no one else is looking. It may not be the world’s biggest crime—but it’s probably going to matter to you and the rest of the waitstaff, and it’s probably going to get this waiter fired. If it doesn’t—if the boss looks the other way because he’s popular with customers, say—you and your fellow employees are entitled to feel betrayed.
When a writer lifts other writers’ words without attribution, or pretends to have done reporting that another reporter actually did, it is viewed as stealing. And if editors don’t take it seriously, we’re collaborators in the crime, which is something we don’t want to be.
It doesn’t affect readers directly—but if you want journalism that you can trust, you need writers and editors who can trust each other.
My question is was there plagerism? Or was this a typical character assassination to wreck the influence of a strong and progressive voice like Hedges?
I’m impressed by the absurd excuses FAIR trots out whenever it comes to someone they agree with politically. Hedges plagiarized more than once … and from his own colleagues which is astonishing. Trust me, no one’s going to care about Hedges from here on out, whatever he writes. Hedges writes about moral values in relation to U.S. foreign policy, society’s ills and other issues. If you preach one thing and practice another, while wanting to bring out the greater good in everyone, that to me is very problematic and incredibly hypocritical, for Hedges and FAIR.
@ ctrenta: Um, how, exactly, is FAIR being hypocritical? Didn’t they just describe Hedges’ behavior as “a serious matter”? “Workplace theft”? “Stealing”? A “crime” I have which editors shouldn’t be “collaborators”, and a violation of trust?
If you can’t be bothered to read a six-paragraph article before shooting your mouth off, what does that say about your ideological blinders?
…*in which* editors shouldn’t be collaborators. Damn auto-correct!
Maybe it’s just me but I always saw Hedges as a hack, in the same league as Thomas Friedman and Slavoj Zizek. Justice is just an opportunity to look witty.
Mea culpa
That Hamsher FDL blog seems pretty defensive & disingenuous. Supposedly the piece in question is an overly-long time-wasting screed to set up “typical Neocon circle-jerk disinformation hatchet jobs”. So I was pretty surprised to find the new republic story to be quite solid with plenty of examples of plagiarism.
Hedges definitely seems to value achieving a position like a modern day MLK with rhetorically powerful moral speeches & writings, possibly at the expense of taking some shortcuts. I remember during & immediately after OWS, he was insistently clear in noting that he was not a member of Occupy and had the journalistic freedom & duty to criticize them while supporting their basic cause. Then as time went by in the years after OWS, these disclosures of distance started to become less emphatic, until he started basically saying “we” and speaking as part of the occupy movement in shorthand.
He also was even explicit in at least one talk a few years ago, joking that his borrowed phrases & arguments from Sheldon Wolin about “inverted totalitarianism” and/or “coup d’état in slow motion” were tiring to keep sourcing to Wolin in speeches, and that he had begun getting sloppy in just leaving the sourcing out of speeches and stating those as if they were part of his own formulation.
I still find Hedges’s stuff to be good, but he certainly seems to have a bit of an ego, and is definitely best when combining literature references and other source work into impassioned & motivating moral speeches.
I have a couple of Hedges’ books (“The Death of the Liberal Class” and “Empire of Illusion”) and I’ve read his online essays over the last few years. I’ve nothing against him. I do think he’s more of a moralizer than deep thinker or brilliant writer and so this charge of plagiarism is going to hit him hard and people will probably not take him seriously from now.
I’ll admit a bias against Parson Hedges – he’s a religious charlatan, a terribly self-ennobled ascetic. Then to see my animadversion confirmed, outing him as more than a plagiarizer, an abusive, ridiculously defensive lying crook when caught, has been salutary.
Then there is the matter of the pious defense of him: oh, it’s nothing, he’s our hero, it’s part of the Giant Conspiracy – devotees seem to enjoy clinging against all reason to supplication before their guru, who seems to revere himself mightily above as a modern saint and lectern superstar.
Good for Christopher Ketcham for the article, good for Naureckas to defend it, but this is much more than a quibble – Hedges’ reactions to the charges were pure Nixonian sleaze.
So many of the journalist “heroes” of our vanquished left were or are outright frauds – Hitchens became a Bushite war whore, Alexander Cockburn a climate change denier, Jeff Cohen a Google shill, Amy Goodman an establishment mouthpiece, Bill Moyers a criminal LBJ operative – so this minor reaction piece by Naureckas for FAIR is a good step towards sanity, and the commenters here on-target.
Is this a right-wing smear campaign to discredit Chris Hedges? Or are there grounds for this accusation? Most plausible explanation: sounds like its a campaign to smear his character.
Comparing Hedges to Thomas Friedman is absurd. At least Hedges got the invasion of Iraq 2003 right. More than you can say about the State Department’s amanuensis at the NYT.
The case made by Ketcham is depressingly solid. It looks like some people couldn’t bring themselves to read it before smearing it as a smear.
Hedges is not the standard-bearer for All That’s Holy. His distinguished career as a war correspondent now is thrown into question by his own disgraceful disregard for honesty, not by whatever you think of the politics of the author of the TNR article (he’s also a Truthdig and Nation contributor, BTW).
Matt Katz spent a huge amount of time and shoe-leather cultivating sources, researching, and writing a masterly series on Camden, and Hedges came along and said, “That looks good — I’m taking it!” He changed insignificant prepositions and reworded here and there as if that would somehow alter the stark and unlovely fact that he was stealing from a lesser-known, highly disciplined reporter who deserved all the credit for his work.
How is it “right-wing” to object to a big honking celebrity poaching Matt Katz’s hard work?
So to tanya marquette, in answer to “was there plagiarism?” I suggest you READ THE ARTICLE. The number of ostriches who can’t give up their crush is just embarrassing.
This is the problem with putting ANYONE on pedestals. I have not read the article, so cannot comment on it, but I can comment on the seemingly universal human need to have heroes. The Cockburns, Amy Goodman, all these people have the same feet of clay as the rest of us, and often have egos that would swallow ours whole; they generally do not seem much given to self-examination.
I’ve enjoyed some of Chris Hedges’s writing, but have always taken him with a grain of salt due to his criticism of leftist support of the Sandinistas (War Is the Force that Gives Us Meaning). Nice to sit in a comfy chair and act high and holy regarding an attempt to create an alternative in Latin America in a country in which just about anything would have been an improvement.
How hard would it have been for Chris Hedges to have written, “As Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Matt Katz has written, in an excellent 4-part series on poverty, politics and corruption in Camden, New Jersey …. “, as prelude to the quotes from Katz that he apparently lifted? It’s amazing to me the coverup, which is almost always worse than the “crime” itself because the errors have been clarified and pointed out.
I wrote an essay a couple of years ago (published in my 2013 book, “What Is Direct Action? Lessons from and to Occupy Wall Street”, taking Chris Hedges to task for his flawed presentations of the histories of U.S.-based radical movements (The Black Panther Party, especially) in some of his books, and his failure to correct any of that even when confronted with the facts, let alone others’ interpretations of those facts.
Hedges exhibits tremendous disdain for left movements that don’t conform to his increasingly moralistic mold. His book, Death of the Liberal Class, “is one of the worst misreadings of history by an acclaimed writer on the Left that I’ve ever seen,” says Brian Tokar, a veteran participant in numerous direct action campaigns and also a professor at the Institute for Social Ecology and of environmental studies at the University of Vermont. “Hedges honestly believes that the New Left accomplished almost nothing, except for some key figures he likes, such as Howard Zinn and the Berrigans.”
In Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges (incredibly, to me) condemns the New Left of the 60s and 70s for having “no political vision.”
So, I am not surprised by these very strong charges. I’ve posted the chapter to my website (so you don’t have to go out and buy the book). Here’s the URL to go directly to that article: http://www.mitchelcohen.com/?p=2262
– Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens/Green Party
http://www.therightperspective.org/2011/01/11/the-dark-side-of-martin-luther-king-jr/
I’m attaching the link not because I agree with the positions taken but as a reminder of other attacks on individuals who had the courage to stand in the face of injustice. King was a flawed human being as is Hedges, as am I, and every single person writing comments on this posting. God forbid my life come under the kind of scrutiny now faced by public figures especially those who fight and Chris H. is certainly a fighter. As I read these reports it is troubling, and clearly Chris made himself vulnerable and has been wounded. However, there is a sense of sharks and hyenas circling here and as with those attacking King, they will be forgotten and Hedge’s work will continue. And that is a good thing.
Looks pretty damning. It could be a smear, which always must be automatically suspected whenever any prominent intellectual on the left is sought to be discredited. But this doesn’t seem like an empty charge. Ketcham is credible, the examples he uses are very effective, and they’re pretty hard to dispute. As for motive, Ketcham would be risking a lot himself to represent as having been anything other than what they were the internal fact-checking processes of Harper’s magazine, or things that were done and said at the magazine between specific high-level personnel while they were involved with this issue. Nonetheless, I’m reserving final judgment (not that what I think is important), until Hedges can respond directly himself, which he might not do. Ketcham does have a close personal connection to the charge, after all, since he claims Hedges cribbed his wife’s stuff. If Hedges is indeed a plagiarist, then so be it. Ketchman will have done a public service.
Incidentally, the other damning dimension to this story (if true), i.e., the serial complicity of Hedges’s publishers, should not go unnoticed.
It is important to know that the author of the Hedges plagarism article has been shopping it around for 1 and a half years. It was rejected by at least Salon and American Prospect once they started fact checking it. The New Republic has stood for the opposite of Hedges; it has been a pro – war, pro-Israel and neoliberal publication.
The article is libel. Did you notice how many people refused to comment and how many did not want their name used? How many of Hedges editors from various publications stood by him? The New Republic seems out their alone in these charges and FAIR should be criticizing them for making such charges rather than sharing them as evidence of plagiarism.
The New Republic’s article is almost entirely predicated on the accusations of one unidentified Harper’s fact-checker. FAIR is usually good about taking people to task for using anonymous sources. Why does this story get a pass???
thanks to those who dug in a bit deeper. my first response was this was a smear attack but FAIR is usually fair. so this raises some serious questions. i would like to see Hedges response to this attack. of course if the attack is from only 1 source he may chose to ignore it as other journals are not supporting the attack article
Andy it sounds like you’re one more person who didn’t read the article very closely if you think it was all based on the words of an anonymous fact-checker. To Tanya, you’ve posted 6 comments here looking desperately for someone to confirm your belief in Hedges, but it’s still not clear that you read the article if Andy & Kevin have satisfied your quest to deem this a smear.
Kevin: are you satisfied completely in this matter just by assassinating the publication source (not even the author who wrote it all)? What about the evidence provided in the story itself? Frankly it raises questions about Salon, American Prospect, and The Nation that they weren’t interested at all in publishing this story. It sounds like they chose internal plagiarism checks against Hedges and preferred to downplay the story to avoid damaging Hedges as a golden goose for left-liberal publishing. I don’t exactly blame them, but their actions can expose plenty of different motivations than just ‘declining to post a weak smear article’ as you’re implying.
Reall, it’s worth reading the article all the way through. The first part is about the unpublished Harper article that we can’t see. But basically the rest of the article cites other instances placing Hedges work in parallel with the work of others and there’s no doubt about those (one of them was Hemingway! At least he could have had some taste. And if he’d have stolen from Ford Madox Ford, noone would have noticed!) So, seriously, this is probably no smear and Hedges, a thorough going psuedo-intellectual, is done.
Eliot Spitzer was slammed in the media and in court because of his personal failings. I don’t like Eliot Spitzer’s politics. I don’t like Eliot Spitzer. I do, however, like the actions he took against Wall Street corruption. Spitzer was able to separate his personal life from his public performance of office and I was also able to separate his personal life from his public life.
When public actions are judged only in the context of the author’s personal failings, the public loses. Some things are true no matter who says them.
The nature of all things in the media is that they are advertisements, and the flawed nature of people is that they require an advertising package for effective delivery. Even a warning by FAIR about plagiarism is an advertisement by and for FAIR because by deploring a plagiarist they advertise that they are opposed to plagiarism, and by doing so imply they never would plagiarize, asserting their own higher moral standard. I agree with their self-evaluation but this statement is an advertising promotion none the less.
A persuasive article in a magazine is not a finding of fact, and neither is a finding of fact in a court necessarily a fact.
If I were to measure the truth of the New Republic relative to Chris Hedges on a moral basis as proposed, I would ask what reporting serves a greater public service, the revelation of possible plagiarism by Hedges before he has had a trial, or the case brought by Hedges against the Obama administration for their NDAA suspension of Habeas Corpus, which, in the “fairness” standards of the court, it could not guarantee that Hedges would not be targeted by this law for repeating the type of reporting he has previously done?
That’s fair enough that you can make a personal judgment call to brush this off, give Hedges the benefit of the doubt, and move on with your other reading queue. But that doesn’t cover coming to the FAIR blog’s comments to brow-beat them about shoddy journalism and trying to convince others that there’s nothing to see here & they can safely ignore the story as you did.
And your example of absent-minded accidentally using someone else’s work was again, already written into the original story as a possible benefit of the doubt, but then examined more closely and shown to be unlikely.
Frankly, I only meant to write my one comment, in which I already noted that I don’t really care and still value Hedges’s work now & into the future based on his other strengths. But these other knee-jerk comments here are a little embarrassing for the FAIR audience.
While Hedges’ actions are quite disappointing, the bigger question is, do they discredit the *content* of his writings? No, they don’t.
As others have noted here, just because he didn’t give his sources proper credit, doesn’t make his content any less true. Let’s not lose sight of that bigger picture.
Look, you’d be hard pressed to find someone more liberal than myself. However, whether the purpose of publishing the article etc. may be politically motivated is, in some respect at least, beside the point. It is not a mere ad hominem attack on Hedges as a person, but calls into question the very substance of his work. Plagiarism is an accusation on the merits. King may have been, and I do not care if he actually was, an adulterer. It is irrelevant as to whether black people were being treated wrongly. But the accusation against Hedges goes to the very substance of his work.
Andy,
As to accidentally borrowing a melody from another song, that does happen quite frequently by accident. It is quite a different thing altogether to lift from an article- at some points verbatim. The only way that can happen for anything longer than a short simple sentence is by lifting. This is commonly known. The statistical probability of lifting paragraph length passages with only minor changes (pronouns, prepositions etc.) is so minute as to be no more significantly probable than zero. The Hemingway way part was not the most damning part of the article, but it was an obvious borrowing without attribution. The worst accusations followed with parallel texts for comparison.
I like Naureckas’ comment. I am an unabashed disciple of Hedges. That is: I like his politics and I like and affirm the religious perspective that frames what he has to say. I just wish I could end the whole mess with a stroke–but only Hedges can do that. 1) He is definitely wrong in his disregard for the accepted rules on the issue of plagiarism. He should acknowledge his misbehavior, apologize for it, and never do it again. 2) He is not just trying to build a following like MLK’s. MLK was marvelously eloquent on foreign policy regarding Vietnam. He came to the debate late, but he spoke out loud and clear. Trouble is you hear nary a word these days of what he said on foreign policy. MLK Day sometimes seems a day dedicated to forgetting what he was all about. Hedges is not some copy-cat of MLK but an authentic continuation of the tradition. At least one of the comments here says no one will pay attention to Hedges any more. I’m sure that is wrong because I am quite sure I will. (By the way, MLK plagiarised a chunk of his doctoral dissertation from, of all people, Reinhold Niebuhr–if I recall accurately. That’s not to try to make an excuse for Hedges, but it may help to keep things in perspective.)
@tanya marquette If all we want is a rational debate without character assassination then will you also condemn the ad hominem against The New Republic? And to go further and suggest as the FDL blog does that it is a right-wing witch hunt, why are the commenters on a left liberal blog disagreeing? Are they just stupid?
Tanya,
If you are saying that criticizing an author and journalist who commits plagiarism is not a criticism of the merits of their work, then you are certainly wrong.
Put that aside for a minute though, and consider whether if we say we believe in integrity, honesty, accuracy, truth, and justice, how then could we not take the accusation of plagiarism seriously, especially when backed by several pieces of good evidence? The same things I would condemn Alan Dershowitz for doing in a shameless defense of Israel’s human rights record, I must condemn in the case of someone who I (usually) I agree with, I do not care about notions of fair and universal boundaries in argumentation.
Tanya,
If you are saying that criticizing an author and journalist who commits plagiarism is not a criticism of the merits of their work, then you are certainly wrong.
Put that aside for a minute though, and consider whether if we say we believe in integrity, honesty, accuracy, truth, and justice, how then could we not take the accusation of plagiarism seriously, especially when backed by several pieces of good evidence? The same things I would condemn Alan Dershowitz for doing in a shameless defense of Israel’s human rights record, I must condemn in the case of someone who I (usually) I agree with, I do not care about notions of fair and universal boundaries in argumentation.
Naureckas writes that a more serious offense would be when a reporter “passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed. Plagiarism has never started a war, as far as I can tell.” But Hedges has been guilty of that as well. In the aftermath of 9-11, Hedges uncritically publicized links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that had been fed to him by CIA-trained Iraqi defectors (one of them apparently not even a defector, but a paid actor). Hedges doesn’t seem to have done due diligence in checking out these sources, except to seek “assurances” from US government officials – the same shoddy stenography as the other reporters that lied us into Iraq.
Mother Jones: Heroes in Error
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/heroes-error
Kevin Zeese comes in for the defense of his fellow lectern-sharer – well, the piece was shopped around, and those bastions of radical journalism, salon.com and The american Prospect, passed! Now, that might be completely damning, except for the fact that no one should ever, ever mistake salon.com or The American Prospect as anything but milquetoast corporate liberals, making them accomplices to the Hedges crookdom conspiracy by refusing to wade their precious toes into this back-pages contretemps.
Of course these advertiser- or foundation-funded stalwarts are going to protect one of their own, which Hedges most certainly is, and that it took a shifty libertarian rag like New Republic to do it speaks more about the moral failure of the establishment liberal outlets than the alleged failings of the piece itself.
Good for the lowly fact-checker for slamming his abusive boss Hedges – there is absolutely no libel in this whistle-blower’s act of conscience, and the FAIR commenting bog fact-checkers should demand an apology and retraction form Zeese for demanding an apology and retraction from Ketcham for demanding an apology and retraction from Hedges- ad infinitum!
Here is Hedges response.
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/282-chris-hedges/2108-response-by-hedges-to-allegations-by-ketcham-in-tnr
Response by Hedges to Allegations by Ketcham in TNR:
Chris Hedges
MONDAY, 16 JUNE 2014 12:48
17 Comments
By Chris Hedges
Statements made in Christopher Ketcham’s article in The New Republic are false and attempt to damage me personally and professionally. The failure by The New Republic to verify the charges by assigning an editor or fact checker to vet the story and contact me or the publications involved, violates the most basic tenets of journalistic ethics. Ketcham has been attempting to publish these allegations for more than a year. His queries engendered lengthy investigations into his charges by The Nation Institute, Nation Books and Truthdig, all of which found no basis for his charges, as they state in the article. Given the gravity of the charges made against me by The New Republic, including an emphatic statement in the headline that I was a plagiarist, the organizations involved, as well as I, should have been allowed a fair hearing from the magazine before publication. An independent and disinterested fact checker or editor should have contacted us. I expect, at the very least, that this response will be run in full by the magazine.
1. The article submitted to Harper’s was not “lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz.” All my reporting was done before the Katz series was published. The Camden story, published eventually in The Nation magazine and used in a longer version in my book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, cited some of the Inquirer’s work, especially statistics gathered by the newspaper, and was properly sourced. The charge — made without any evidence and without sources about an unpublished manuscript — that passages and quotes were taken from the Inquirer series is simply untrue. The charge that I copied quotes from another reporter is also untrue. These allegations, which are very serious, should not have been made unless accompanied by textual proof. There was none. Indeed, Ketcham admits that he never read the manuscript.
2. There are numerous footnotes to the Inquirer in the Camden chapter of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Katz is credited for the reporting he did in the footnotes and directly in the text. These two particular passages cited by Ketcham are footnoted to the wrong Katz article. This error was corrected. To cite an incorrect footnote as an example of plagiarism is inappropriate.
3. I changed the Ernest Hemingway passage in my book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning after the first edition several months before Thomas Palaima’s complaint. The editors and I make changes if errors are found in all new editions. Indeed, I request them to be made.
4. I corrected the Neil Postman reference after my “2011: A Brave New Dystopia” column was put up on Truthdig when similarity in style came to my attention. The quote, used in my book Empire of Illusion, was always in quotes and footnoted.
5. The Petra Bartosiewicz material in my column “The Terror-Industrial Complex” was sourced to Harpers and to Bartosiewicz three times. There were a few paragraphs following the sourcing that should have been set off in block quotes. Bartosiewicz’s editor at Harper’s, Luke Mitchell, called it to our attention. Mitchell asked us to fix what he described as a “formatting error” in the “much appreciated” Truthdig column that cited her work. The fix was made, in consultation with Mitchell, the next day and ran along with an editor’s not
6. Naomi Klein in an article in The Nation magazine referred to some statements of fact about climate change. I used these statements of fact, but I did not copy her words. In hindsight, I would have linked to and cited directly her article, especially given how much I admire her work.
My work as a journalist and an author has been dedicated to telling the truth. I have made errors, and will no doubt make errors in the future. But I always seek when I discover these errors or when they are discovered by others to make corrections. I do not willfully hurt anyone or appropriate anyone else’s work. Writers, especially writers who have produced, as I have, hundreds of thousands of words of printed copy, are fallible. What matters are intent and a willingness to own up to inadvertent errors or mistakes. I have always worked, and will continue to work, to be as transparent and honest as possible.
Tanya: I really like the flavor of your writing and the direction of your judgments. Keep up the good work.
Okay, Kevin, thnks for including the original source of the response, Hedges’ own. Hopefully this can engender the next round!
Hedges demands a retrospective “tact-checker” for Ketcham’s piece – why? Let journalists write journalism. Ketcham’s bombshell reporting now has the whole left side of the Internet as a fact-checker.
There’s a lot of “I didn’t do it – but I did do that, and I did this” in Hedges wobbly, as always tendentious mea sorta culpa.
Plagiarism is a problem, and I”m happy to see it being placed as a public ill in the lowly backwaters, but this “scandal” should point to the greater morass of Hedges’ self-ennoblement. The vanquished left has placed too much of its dwindling capital in these extremely flawed and conflicted gurus – Nader, Hedges, Chomsky, the Nation gang, Obama, Carter, the Dalia Lama, Jesus Christ, Michael Moore, Pete Seeger, localvores, Bill MacKibben, professors, and Jeff Cohen.
A ‘Political Hit’ On Progressive Firebrand Chris Hedges: The New Republic Charges Chris Hedges With Plagiarism — Yet Ignores the Plagiarism of its Own Writer, Alan Dershowitz http://tiny.cc/pmhohx