They do say that what comes around, goes around.
Ann Coulter’s spittle-flecked invective has long been known to be poorly supported by facts as well as, in Tom and Ray Magliozzi’s phrase, “unencumbered by the thought process.” Al Franken had a team of Harvard students fact-check her book Slander and its 780 footnotes for his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Surprise! Mostly crap, and a substantial number of lies and misrepresentations (like, for instance, her lie that the New York Times ignored Dale Earnhart’s death when they in fact put it on the front page).
But now we have confirmation that Annie doesn’t even make up all her own bile. The Rude Pundit, rudely smelling a rat, started taking a closer look at her new polemic, Godless, with backup from Raw Story. And lo and behold, Annie’s been stealing from other authors.
Oh, and remember how I said that you don’t fuck with the Jersey Girls, lest even the New York Post turn on you? This is where that going-around-coming-around thing comes in. The Post, piqued about Ann’s slamming of the 9/11 widows known as the Jersey Girls (who are, after all, local heroes for getting the 9/11 Commission going) in the book and on Larry King, hired a plagiarism expert, John Barrie, who found that several chapters in Godless and some of Ann’s syndicated columns were riddled with lifted passages. (MSNBC also spoke to him.)
If that number sounds low, it’s not an indication that she only plagiarized a few times. Oh, no. It’s an indication that she tries men’s souls. As Barrie told TPM Muckraker’s Justin Rood:
“The next day, [NYPost reporter] Philip Recchia called me and said, Ann Coulter’s book. . . let’s run that through,” Barrie told me. But his company does its analysis by computer, so the book had to be scanned into a digital format. “The New York Post, at their expense, OCR’d every damn page of that book.
“Oh, my God, how long is that book?” Barrie added. “By the way, if I never read Ann Coulter again, it will be too soon.”
The paper also scanned in the last 12 months of Coulter’s columns for Barrie to analyze.
It didn’t take long to find evidence of plagiarism, Barrie said. “After we found three in the book, we called it quits. I think we found four of her syndicated columns that had problems.” But the task proved draining, he said — on himself, not his technology. “After combing through Ann Coulter for a while, it doesn’t take long before you want to call it quits. I want to prove the technology, but I don’t want to make my eyes bleed.”
Coulter’s column is syndicated through Universal Press Syndicate, which called Barrie twice and asked for his “report,” but as he’s already published his findings and the Post paid for the proprietary technology, he’s told them that they’ll have to pay as well — he’s not giving it away for free. Presumably, however, UPS will conduct an investigation. Whether she’ll get the Box Turtle Ben treatment remains to be seen.
Bravo, Rude Pundit. Even if you’re not getting the credit you deserve for being the first one on this.
I’m howling with derisive laughter here!
I’m sure, of course, that Coulter’s dittohead fans will be frothing at the mouth about the Evil Liberal Mainstream Media Conspiracy, etc…but then, that’s the standard wingnut whining, so what else is new?
I am shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!
(About as shocked as I was at the revelation that the WMD thing was bullshit)
I am truly shocked that the New York Post is breaking this story.
Not because she’s a conservative they once would have embraced. Because it’s the Post! BREAKING a STORY! It’s almost like Ann Coulter telling the truth.
Bravo to the Rude One… Bravo.
Oh and not only to the Rude One, but Bravo to Ron Brynaert who broke the story as well… least we forget.
It takes a brave soul indeed to step forward and take the credit for being the true author of an Ann Coulter screed.
I’m curious just what the degree of “plagarism” actually is. Are we talking about a sentence or paragraph here and there, or are we talking wholesale diatribes being lifted from other sources?
Did she lift “fact statements”, without providing footnotes, or did she lift _arguments_ from other sources without providing credit? The bits that Rude Pundit cites are what I’d call “fact statements”, and failing to footnote them is sloppy work, but that’s perhaps less evil than pirating other people’s arguments and presenting them as your own.
I’d like to see the report from John Barrie’s analysis.
BTW – I don’t like Ann Coulter particularly, but the accusation of plagarism is quite serious.
Looks to me like it’s entire sentences and paragraphs. Which, while not the same as copying an entire op/ed and calling it yours, is still plagiarism.
People get thrown out of college for that kind of crap! Can we throw Ann off the media-circuit? I just don’t want to have to deal with the venom and bulging eyes every time I’m flipping channels.
[...] me
7.7.2006
Schadenfreudelicious
Posted by zuzu @ 10:21 am
Plagiarizin’ Annie seems to be getting a lot of attention. Just not th [...]
I’ve OCR’d and proofread quite a few books. The OCR part is just mechanical and boring; using the program I’ve got, you don’t actually read the thing as you do it, all you do is turn the page, mash the book down on the scanner, turn the next page, mash again, turn, mash, turn mash turn mash… But the proofreading part, at least if you’re trying to do a quality job, is intense; it’s like relocating your mind into the author’s skull. By the time you’re done, for days afterwards the voice in your own head speaks in that author’s accent.
One time a few years back I was in a book store, and suffering from that old killed-the-cat style curiosity I picked up one of that revolting woman’s vicious and idiotic books and read about thirty pages in a row. Good Lord, it was vile. I can’t remember reading anything comparably dismal since I read the neo-Nazi William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. If your only contacts with Coulter’s literary product are the little one-or-two-paragraph snippets excerpted by the horrified authors of weblogs, you can’t appreciate what an enduro it is for a sane person to try to wade through the entirety of one of her moronic, septic tracts. So I truly shudder to think of any sensible person subjecting himself to the ordeal of proofing a scan of Coulter’s trash.
No kidding. Clearly it only happened because one too many people, finally, had had ENOUGH.
hee.
just goes to prove:
you can piss off some of the people all of the time; and all of the people some of the time; but…