Wow.
I’ve thought Chris Hedges is a terrible writer and human being ever since I read his terrible book I Don’t Believe in Atheists which came out in 2008. I found it to be both sloppy and vulgarly abusive; both lazily written and dishonest about the people he was abusing.
Well color me prophetic then, in light of a long piece in The New Republic reporting several instances of fairly shameless plagiarism. And then for good measure there’s Hedges’s belligerence when the plagiarism is pointed out to him, and then there’s also the circling of the wagons by his friends and colleagues, who swear up and down that he’s just a great guy so please shut up and go away. Yeah that sounds familiar.
Christopher Ketcham writes that Hedges submitted a long piece to Harper’s in 2010 about poverty in Camden, New Jersey.
The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a PhiladelphiaInquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.
Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times,where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in two widely read progressive websites, TruthOut andTruthdig. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-sellingAmerican Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.
Some progressive readers. Not among me. That atheism book of his just reeks of badness – moral badness, characterological badness, not just literary or journalistic badness.
So, there was a lot of back and forth over the Harper’s article, with Hedges denying and excusing every step of the way.
“The Katz stuff was flat out plagiarism,” says the Harper’s fact-checker. “At least twenty instances of sentences that were exactly the same. Three grafs where a ‘that’ was changed to a ‘which.’” The fact-checker reiterated to me that first-person accounts in Hedges’s draft had him quoting the same sources as in Katz’s pieces, with the sources using exactly the same wording as in Katz’s pieces. “Hedges not only used another journalist’s quotes,” says the fact-checker, “but he used them in first-person scenes, claiming he himself gathered the quotes. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen as a fact-checker at the magazine. And it was endemic throughout the piece.”
The fact-checker spoke on the phone with Hedges at least three times and exchanged about a dozen e-mails with him. “He was very unhelpful from the beginning, and very aggressive,” said the fact-checker. Hedges repeatedly claimed he had done original reporting. “Hedges reassured me there were no problems,” said Ross. “He then went to the fact-checker and tried to intimidate him and give him a hard time. Hedges told him, ‘Why are you going to the editor?’”
That fits exactly the impression I already had of him – he’s a very aggressive guy. He did a Point of Inquiry once, I think with Chris Mooney, in which he lost his temper and got very shouty. He’s a bully.
There’s a mass of detail in the article, all of it interesting.
In a query to Truthdig, I stated that this article would reveal at least two instances of plagiarism in Hedges’s Truthdig articles and asked for a response. Truthdig managing editor Peter Scheer replied: “Truthdig has always found Chris Hedges to be a journalist of high ethical standards. Years ago we received one request and one complaint from a Harper’s editor representing Christopher Ketcham and his wife. We resolved those issues with notes, links and clarifications to the satisfaction of everyone involved.” He made no reference to the Postman column. (It should be noted that the Harper’s editor was representing the magazine.)
Truthdig founder and editor-in-chief Robert Scheer (Peter’s father) later wrote: “I remain enormously impressed with the body of Chris Hedges’s work and would match it quite favorably for integrity and wisdom against any comparable offerings elsewhere on the Internet.”
When asked about the change in the text in order to credit Postman, the elder Scheer did not address the particulars of the change but wrote only that “Truthdig corrects errors when they are brought to our attention as we did in this instance.”
See what I mean about the wagon-circling? He’s our guy. He’s a hero. You must be wrong.
When I was researching this article for Salon, the editors there pressedTruthdig, given that the Postman correction appeared to be downplaying the plagiarism. In an e-mail to the Scheers and Truthdig publisher Zuade Kaufman, a Salon editor noted that, “due to the changes to Hedges’s piece that referenced Bartosiewicz’s article, Truthdig was clearly aware of potential misattributions in Hedges’s articles. When another attribution problem appeared in a Hedges article, Truthdig corrected it with an editor’s note that was both less specific and less prominently placed than the first one.”
Salon’s numerous attempts to get clarification of Truthdig’s correction policy finally resulted in a letter from Truthdig publisher Kaufman, who presented a series of accusations against both Salon and myself. “We are surprised that a publication as prominent as Salon would take this matter seriously,” wrote Kaufman. “In all honesty, we feel it raises serious questions regarding the true motives of Salon and Mr. Ketcham.”
Kaufman went on to note the “relative positions in the journalistic community between Salon and Truthdig and between Mr. Ketcham (and his spouse) and Mr. Hedges.” Because of these “relative positions” in the hierarchy of journalism, Kaufman stressed that “the issue of commercial motives cannot be disregarded,” and cited without elaboration “possible personal, economic and commercial gain that would be derived by Salon and Mr. Ketcham from damaging the reputation of Truthdig, Mr. Hedges, the Nation and other competitive publications and authors.”1 Nowhere in her letter did she address the Postman correction and its implications.
Sound familiar? Kill the messenger? “Drama.” “Blog hits.” “Rage-blogging.” “Attention-whore.”
I asked two journalism ethicists to look at the instances of plagiarism described throughout this piece. “These examples suggest not inadvertent plagiarism,” said Kelly McBride, who runs the Ethics Department at the journalism school the Poynter Institute, “but carefully thought out plagiarism meant to skirt the most liberal definition of plagiarism.” Robert Drechsel, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the use of material from Klein, Postman, and Hemingway “could be characterized as something that has come to be called ‘patchwriting.’ English and writing professors Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard have defined it as ‘restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source.’ Whether it happens intentionally, carelessly, or as an oversight, it’s a very serious matter.”
“Whatever the explanation for Hedges’s reporting,” Drechsel told me, “harm will have occurred. Trust is a journalist’s and journalism’s most precious commodity. Difficult to gain and virtually impossible to regain once lost. If there is even a hint of the possibility that misconduct was covered up, it’s even worse. Journalism will take another hit.”
But, you know, they’re just journalism ethicists, they’re not part of the Truthdig in-crowd, they’re not in the wagons that are being circled.
Ketcham includes a mournful little endnote.
As an authorial aside from the perspective of over 15 years of freelance journalism, and in the context of Kaufman’s letter, I should note that a possible result of this piece will be the burning of my bridges at the Nation, where I know the editors and have been published; the Nation Institute, from which I have received funding for investigative journalism published in Harper’s and elsewhere; Truthdig, where I have published half-a-dozen columns and have been proud of my work; and Nation Books, Hedges’s current publisher, a house I have always respected and admired.
Yup. Those bridges could be ashes now.
Eesh. Even if that weren’t plagiarism, it’d still be crappy editing.
Projection much? Inquiries into bad behavior are reasonable at any social level. I always look at the motivations of people that try to read into the motivations of those asking about the bad behavior. Sure the motivations of the person asking about the bad behavior might not be the best (political points instead of trying to draw attention to a problem or solving a problem), but the moral and ethical value of shining a light on incompetence, unethical, or immoral behavior are obvious (independent of any dishonest ways of using the result of that attention).
Questioning the motivations of the people trying to draw attention to and solve problem problems on the other hand, that’s always political and always revealing of what the person or group doing that sort of questioning is really like.
Sound familiar? Kill the messenger? “Drama.” “Blog hits.” “Rage-blogging.” “Attention-whore.”
Indeed.
I admit, few misdeeds would surprise me from a person capable of an atrocious book title like “I Don’t Believe in Atheists”.
I’m glad I’m not the only one unimpressed by I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Hedges argued against several strawmen, his arguments were often poor, and his writing was poor. Perhaps his plagiarism is because he can’t write very well and relies on other writers to carry the load for him.
Well, shame on me – I’d always thought Hedges’s journalistic shortcomings came from doing his own fieldwork and egotistically neglecting to read up on background sources with more and deeper information.
I haven’t read the don’t believe in atheists book because I haven’t liked other things he wrote. His writing is not persuasive, at least what I’ve read, and it seems lazy, slipshod, and second-rate. I checked out Empire of Illusion a couple of years ago, and found it difficult to stomach the arguments, which seemed to be based on his personal distaste for the things that are common in pop culture. He rarely spent much time developing the argument he was supposedly making in each chapter, instead getting deviated into a discussion of pro wrestling and pornography while supposedly discussing literacy. There are so many better writers out there, I just decided to ignore him, though I do still have American Fascists unread in my stacks.
I rather liked Empire of Illusion. I think one of the things that I specifically remember about it was the bit about how so many people think their life is an action movie, and they are the protagonist. Maybe I’m reading my own thoughts and such into it, but it reminded me a lot of the stuff like this open-carry bullshit and stand-your-ground travesties lately.
I pretty much just ignored/dismissed the anti-atheism thing.
Not that I’m trying to defend him, just that I did like some of his stuff I ran across, and I’m rather disappointed to hear this.
Here’s the same damn’ mechanism of rationalization and denial. MINUS the misogyny issue. As horrible as the ‘bro’ justifications are, they seem to represent an aspect of a larger category of intellectual and moral laziness.
Thank you for criticizing Chris Hedges. While I abhor his anti-atheist work, there is a lot else that he has written since then that I thought was worth criticizing as well for various reasons and I’ve found it both baffling and angering how many people are willing to just not consider what he’s saying because they think that he supports them.
Here’s a sampling of some of the responses in defense of him:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/16-5
From teddieballgame
A second, similar response from the same person:
Ando Arike in agreeing with the first response:
There’s a lot of hidden irony in these responses. Here’s another one from “Skeptical Scott”:
“Siouxrose”
(The same person earlier in the same thread said that the reason why people haven’t made contact with extraterrestrial life is because the friendly aliens are quarantining us.)
Moving on to firedoglake, Jane Hamsher’s (the site owner’s) defense of Hedges consisted in no small part of the fact that the Ketcham article was….long and needed editing. Of course, if it was shorter then there would have been less evidence of Chris Hedges’ plagiarism and it would have been more easily dismissible. I think a much shorter, and more accurate statement of her attitude is expressed with “Sorry but the comments are closed on this post”. (Usually discussion periods at firedoglake last for up to a week instead of three days).
I apologize for being redundant concerning Jane Hamsher’s response; I didn’t realize that there were two other posts concerning it when I wrote my post.