Donald Trump is set to helm one of the most ethically challenged administrations in recent memory. From Trump himself on down, it will be full of people with stratospheric conflicts of interest. Well, add another ethical problem to the list. A book written by one of his top national security advisers is a steaming pile of plagiarism.
Right-wing talk show host and Fox News analyst Monica Crowley is slated to become senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. Apparently Trump has no problem having someone who openly invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails in his administration. But CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski discovered that Crowley has another, equally fundamental problem. Apparently she can’t express things in her own words.
Kaczynski’s investigative team at the CNN KFile peered into the guts of Crowley’s 2012 book, “What The (Bleep) Just Happened,” published by HarperCollins’ conservative imprint, Broadside Books. This book supposedly represented her take on how conservatives could fight back against the Obama administration. I say “supposedly” because the KFile discovered no fewer than 50 instances where Crowley lifted phrases, sentences, and even whole paragraphs from other sources without attribution.
Among the more blatant examples:
- A section on the Keynesian multiplier appears to have been lifted almost verbatim from an Investopedia article on the topic written in 2009.
- Two paragraphs attacking organized labor were copied from an article published by the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, in 2004.
- A section on torture was copied wholesale from an article written by one of her Fox News colleagues in 2010.
Crowley also lifted material from fellow columnists Andrew McCarthy, Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and others. She also copied articles from a broad range of sources–RedState, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC, the Heritage Foundation, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. In many cases, she only made cosmetic changes.
See for yourself.
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/817792129288273921
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/817792737969930245
Apparently Kaczynski’s spidey senses were triggered when he noticed that “What The (Bleep) Just Happened” had no notes or bibliography. This major omission should not have gone unnoticed by her editors at Broadside. Crowley has a PhD from Columbia, so you would have thought she would have known the importance of showing how she cited her sources.
It also should have raised eyebrows at Fox News. HarperCollins and Fox News were both subsidiaries of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation at the time this book was published, and all Fox News personalities are required to publish their books through HarperCollins. When Murdoch split his interests in 2013–shortly after Crowley’s book was published–Fox News followed the broadcasting interests into 21st Century Fox, while HarperCollins and the print interests became part of a new News Corporation. However, Fox News personalities are still required to use HarperCollins as their publisher.
This isn’t the first time that Crowley has been accused of plagiarism. Back in 1999, Crowley penned a commentary in The Wall Street Journal about the passing of Richard Nixon, who gave her her first job in politics. Four days later, the Journal got word about “striking similarities” between Crowley’s article and a 1988 article about Nixon in Commentary. Journal editors maintained that they would have never run this article had they known about those similarities. Apparently Crowley must be one hell of a talker, because she managed to keep her gig at the fair and balanced network.
The Trump team responded in typical fashion, saying that any claims that Crowley is a plagiarist are nothing more than “a politically motivated attack.” That sounds a lot like the response the Trump campaign delivered when it emerged two paragraphs of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention were carbon copies from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. But considering that Crowley has been busted for this before, it hardly sounds believable.
Trump says that he wants “the best people” on his team. Well, apparently he has a funny definition of “best people” if he’s willing to stand by someone who has been caught red-handed plagiarizing material–especially considering that she should know better.
Trump isn’t the only one with some explaining to do. It is beyond belief that HarperCollins would publish this book without any notes or bibliography. That alone represents a complete failure of the very safeguards that any publisher should have against plagiarism. A HarperCollins spokeswoman says that the publisher is looking into the matter. They need to do a lot more than that. They need to tear up Crowley’s contract and get this book off the shelves. Tell HarperCollins what you think on Facebook and on Twitter.
(featured image courtesy Crowley’s Facebook)
