Gerald Posner

Saturday’s Fox News Watch gave attention to two recent plagiarism scandals – one involving Gerald Posner of the Daily Beast, the other involving Zachery Kouwe of the New York Times. Host Jon Scott summarized the stories:

First, chief investigative reporter for the DailyBeast.com, Gerald Posner, admits to lifting five sentences from the Miami Herald. Posner says he was horrified and has no idea how it happened. Second, New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe quit his job after it was learned that he copied several paragraphs from an article previously published in the Wall Street Journal. Kouwe’s February 5 article contained identical or nearly identical sentences to an article published in the journal’s online edition. He apparently was called on the carpet and decided to resign that day.

After FNC analyst Judy Miller argued that it would be easy to plagiarize by mistake, Scott brought up the time FNC mistakenly used video of a Sarah Palin campaign rally with a large crowd while intending to use a clip from one of her book signing events, and how the liberal media pounced on FNC, while the current plagiarism stories have received little attention. Scott:

For Friday's Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann showed up wearing his tinfoil hat to cover the recent break in the Anthrax attacks case from 2001, as he charged that "the government took advantage of this situation to use it as a tool to build up a case to go to war in Iraq," and, stepping into his "conspiracy theory" mode, even suggested that the Bush administration was not interested in quickly solving the case. Olbermann: "And in that context, there would be no rush to find the deranged, solo killer."

During the show's teaser, Olbermann's bizarre choice of words made it sound as if he were theorizing about the possibility of a conspiracy to carry out the Anthrax attacks to build support for invading Iraq, as the MSNBC host used the loaded phrase "it was an inside job" because the suspect was a government employee, and then seemed to link John McCain's speculation from 2001 that the Anthrax "may have come from Iraq," to the "motive." Before playing a clip of McCain, Olbermann teased: "For motive, for explanation, there are few options, and all of them are terrifying, including why people like U.S. Senators were saying this in 2001."