List of Plagiarists

Randall Hoven:

Scott Beauchamp was the last straw. I realized that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the fallen journalists, journalistic mistakes and major and minor screw-ups in the media. I couldn't find one already made, although Wikipedia came close, so I started my own. I apologize if there is a good list already out there, but I looked and could not find.

Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias. Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier. Some are silly, such as reporting on a baseball game watched on TV. Some are more serious.

Noonan on Cultural Culpability After VaTech Shooting

Peggy Noonan:

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Sheng-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

Lowry: Imus Latest was Nothing New

Rich Lowry

The Imus saga is another sign of how we’ve degraded the importance of politeness and decorum, and how we try to make up for the loss with political correctness. Imus’ show was always boorish, but that was OK until he offended the wrong people at the wrong time with the wrong term. We shouldn’t want our public conversation to be limited to the dulcet tones of public radio — some shouting and barbs are healthy — but it should have a grounding in civility. On that score, Imus struck out long ago.

Stossel: The Fear Industrial Complex

John Stossel:

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu -- the boring kind -- kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn't want to hear that. "I say, 'You need a flu shot.' You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, 'Don't talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?'"

Here's another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for "20/20," I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I'm sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don't know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds. Of course, it doesn't help that viewers are as ignorant about probability as reporters are.

More here from Spiked.

Wilson, Plame and all that

Valerie Plame finally testified before the house that she was "covert" and didn't initiate or push for sending her husband, Joe Wilson, to Niger. Tom Maguire offers a broad corrective, Byron York reminds us what the Senate Intelligence Committee found, Andy McCarthy deals with "covert" and recalls that the MSM had argued she wasn't before reporting that she was:

Specifically, she was exposed by a Russian spy in the early 1990s. Thereafter, the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, "the documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."

As I wrote here nearly two years ago, this is not my claim. It is the contention made in a 2005 brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by the Times along with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch). The mainstream media made the contention in an attempt to quash subpoenas issued to journalists — the argument being that if Mrs. Wilson's cover had already been blown, there could have been no crime when an administration official (who we now know to be Richard Armitage, not Scooter Libby) leaked her identity to journalist Robert Novak, and thus there was no need to compel reporters to reveal their sources.

Amazing how, when its own interests are at stake, the media manages to be very forceful in reporting relevant facts. But now, when those facts are even more relevant because Mrs. Wilson and congressional Democrats are bloviating about ruined intelligence networks and threatened lives, the media won't mention them. How can it be possible that a leak in 2002 "jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents" associated with Mrs. Wilson's covert assignment when, by the media's own account to a federal court, those networks had to have been blown for years?

And, don't forget, Joe Wilson was the real creep in this whole mess.