Ann Coulter Plagiarism Update

For those of you who’ve been wanting to keep up with the developing story of Ann Coulter’s plagiarism scandal(and for those who’ve been drawn to my blogging thanks to Egarwaen’s fantastic signature on his posts – thanks E. for the publicity, btw), I present you a roundup of sorts.

More after the break!
The Rude Pundit has a timeline of his and Raw Story’s coverage of Coulter’s plagiarism.

Media Matters asks if corporate media outlets will continue to give the succubus air time, and if so if the charges of plagiarism will even get mentioned.

The Gawker has fun with Coulter’s dissing the NY Post (a tabloid), which has recently published a story on Coulter’s plagiarism, for of all things “being a tabloid.”

According to Editor & Publisher, apparently the Universal Press Syndicate (the org. that distributes the Brownshirt Barbie’s columns to unsuspecting newspapers) is finally getting off its ass and is now fixing to investigate the plagiarism charges.

Bottom line: the jig is up. We’ll soon see if those who’ve been most outraged about Ward Churchill’s problem with cribbing footnotes will show the same outrage at what Frau Coulter has done. If nothing else, any publisher of her books should put a distinctive label on her book covers that states, “The insane rantings contained herein may or may not be the work of Ann Coulter. In fact, they may be someone else’s insane rantings that she’s chosen to appropriate uncredited. Who knows?”

If your local paper just happens to be one of the “lucky” recipients of her column, write to the paper’s editor and confront the editor about the plagiarism charges (with of course the investigative reporting that has already been done and spearheaded by The Rude Pundit). Maybe some of these editors will do the right thing and yank the column. One can hope.

Also, if you’re already on amazon.com anyway, go look up Coulter’s book “Godless” and add a few “tags” to her book. You can use mine (“plagiarism”, “plagiarized”, and “plagiarist”) and you don’t even have to credit me.

This is a modified version of something posted earlier Friday at my blog.  

Warning: for those who are easily offended, my blog is a very dangerous place. I’m even meaner over there.

Update: Via Steve Gilliard’s News Blog, I ran across The Rude One’s commentary on her publisher’s defense of their embattled author How Defending Ann Coulter Is Like Defending a Serial Killer, which reminds me of the advice I try to give to my students on a regular basis: when in doubt, cite, cite, cite. Not only has she been caught red-handed directly lifting whole passages verbatim, but she’s also got this nasty habit of failing to cite her references. A bunch of haphazardly slung-together endnotes will not suffice, especially when the original sources are still not credited properly.

Of course New York Post is still having fun with this story.

As they say in the journalism biz, developing…

Author: James Benjamin

Nothing to see here. Move along.