Last week I posted about Benny Johnson’s firing from BuzzFeed: Who Did Benny Johnson Tick Off? This post got a bit of attention, eliciting predictable responses from BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Gawker’s J.K. Trotter. I even got @blippoblappo to laugh!
However, while @blippoblappo was laughing, he/she was also typing furiously.
@blippoblappo and @crushingbort, proprietors of the blog which allowed Ben Smith and J.K. Trotter to take down Benny Johnson, were busy preparing a smear on Farheed Zakaria. I guess they took my criticisms seriously and decided that a blog ‘on Journalism’ ought to talk about somebody else besides Benny Johnson. One day after my post regarding ‘Our Bad Media’, @blippoblappo and @crushingbort rushed out this monstrosity: Did CNN, The Washington Post, and TIME Actually Check Fareed Zakaria’s Work For Plagiarism?
I call this post a monstrosity because many of the instances of accused ‘plagiarism’ involve Zakaria quoting statistics. Although Zakaria should have said where the numbers came from in every instance, this type plagiarism is small fry in the larger trend of theft that ‘Our Bad Media’ claims to be fighting.
@blippoblappo and @crushingbort: it feels like you’re scraping the barrel. Is re-shaming Fareed Zakaria the most pressing issue in the universe of journalistic plagiarism?
I have little respect for Zakaria, he typifies soft establishment journalism. However, I find it difficult to believe that Zakaria’s (mis)use of statistics constitutes egregious ‘undiscovered’ plagiarism, or that they are extraordinary examples of plagiarism amongst journalists in general. I think that there are worse instances of high-profile plagiarism out there, but there probably aren’t many high-profile targets as soft as Fareed, whose career was very publicly blighted by plagiarism back in 2012. Fareed is an easy target.
It seems that many ‘Our Bad Media’ readers agree with me. Out of the 34 comments their first post generated, here are some gems:
It’s one thing to plagiarize the written expression of ideas, quite another to cite statistics. Seems to me, Zakaria is just lazy, restating numerical data and statistics, using someone else’s words. The bar is much lower, IMO. I thou doth protest too much.
And…
This is ridiculous. Almost every example you cite are statistics or quotes. We’re supposed to be outraged? Don’t quit your day job hacks.
Not only did @blippoblappo’s and @crushingbort’s attack on Zakaria not get them love, it didn’t get them quality press either. They knew that they had to to better, so the next day on August 20th, they published How And Why Lying About Plagiarism Is Bad – A Response To Fareed Zakaria And Fred Hiatt; followed by The Paste-American World: How Fareed Zakaria Plagiarized In His International Bestseller (And The Magazines He Used To Run) on August 22nd.
The first one of those garnered all of four comments, each one dripping with support for @blippoblappo and @crushingbort. It also promised that “Our Bad Media will have more extensive examples of plagiarism by Fareed Zakaria later this week.”
Those extensive examples came from Zakaria’s book The Post-American World and two articles from Foreign Affairs and Newsweek. Even though @blippoblappo and @crushingbort felt their previous work held up “pretty well”, they piled these instances of plagiarism on top of the mess, and added a few off-topic attacks, such as the following:
Post-American World can be best described up as the kind of book your dad bought at the airport to kill time reading about This Changing Planet Of Ours, then bought again later because it had a 2.0 at the end, the way his phone’s fart noise app did when it added new fart noises.
The last post generated 13 comments which, again, are dripping support for @blippoblappo and @crushingbort. See a pattern? Our anonymous bloggers are on the defensive.
I have no doubt that Fareed Zakaria is a plagiarist. He’s also a lazy journalist who habitually paraphrases other writers so that he doesn’t have to do work himself. Everybody knows this; it’s old news. Zakaria is a very safe target for @blippoblappo and @crushingbort to attack, and they’ve clearly done a minimal amount of work to do so.
In conclusion, attacking the shoddy journalist Fareed Zakaria is an easy ‘n’ fast way for @blippoblappo and @crushingbort to ‘prove’ that they don’t just have a ‘boner’ for Benny. ;)
I’d like to remind readers that @blippoblappo and @crushingbort said they didn’t have a clear agenda when they began their crusade against Benny Johnson last month. Consider this quote from their article with Talking Points Memo:
TPM: Do you plan to continue scrutinizing BuzzFeed?
@crushingbort: This was all done on a whim and I’m not sure what we do next, but this isn’t meant to be some kind of anti-BuzzFeed initiative. Jesse Eisinger made a point I strongly agree with, which is that plagiarism is far from the worst problem in journalism. But it seems to be the one of the few that editors respond to.
Sometime after their take-down of Johnson– and *probably* after being called out as hired hacks by yours truly– @blippoblappo and @crushingbort decided a half-assed assault on well-known plagiarist Fareed Zakaria was a good idea.
@blippoblappo and @crushingbort: how’s this all working out for you?
I look forward to @blippoblappo’s and @crushingbort’s next attempt to spin a career out of their sloppy ‘Benny’ job.
P.S. @BennyJohnson has been a very quiet twitter account since July 26th. Does BuzzFeed have Benny Johnson on such a tight contract that he can’t talk about his experiences? That kinda goes against BuzzFeed’s informal, fun-loving image, doesn’t it? Have 1000 BuzzFeed lawyers made sure that no Peretti creation will ever go rogue against the outlet? Is my source for fuzzy cat pics really an authoritarian bully?
Thank you, buzzgasm.com
