On the heels of mine from just a few hours ago, where the AP and ABC had to admit that one of their "news consultants" had lied his way through the MSM for several years, the HuffPost has had to pull a piece from one of their contributors. Turns out it was nearly a word for word theft of an article by The New Republic's James Kirchick.
Several months ago, I published an essay in Azure, the quarterly journal of Israel's Shalem Center, about South Africa's troubling foreign policies. You can read it here.On Monday, a South African blogger with whom I regularly correspond informed me that an article published September 6 on The Huffington Post read almost exactly like my piece, only shorter. You can read that article, by a Norwegian journalist and former United Nations employee named Henning Andrè Søgaard, here. While my original essay was more than four thousand words and Søgaard's was op-ed length, nearly every sentence in "his" article was directly lifted from mine. Noah Pollak, an editor of Azure, shows just two of many examples. If for whatever reason you remain unconvinced, read the concluding paragraphs of both pieces.
I informed the Huffington Post of this news on Monday, but it was not until Wednesday afternoon (after Pollak disclosed the incident on The Corner) that the piece was removed from their website. In it's place reads a fatuous message:
Editor's note: We have chosen to take down Henning Andrè Søgaard's piece because of editorial similarities to a previously published work. We are awaiting a response from Mr. Søgaard who wishes to defend the piece.
"Editorial similarities" is a wonderfully creative euphemism for "plagiarism," almost as vacuous a literary construction as "Fake but accurate." There is no worse offense in the journalistic profession than stealing someone else's work and those who do should be named, shamed, and driven out of the profession altogether, never to write again. Either way, it's long past time that the Huffington Post, at the very least, publicly admit that Mr. Søgaard is a journalistic thief.
Lefty on lefty crime. Boy it's just all so disheartening!
Update The HuffPost's revenge, as the piece is pulled.
The HuffPost has seen the light as their site now reads:
Editor's note: We have chosen to remove Henning André Søgaard's piece because it contained numerous passages copied without attribution from an article written by James Kirchick that was published in Azure. Mr. Søgaard, who initially indicated a desire to defend the piece, has since failed to do so. He will no longer be allowed to blog on this site
Vindication for Mr. Kirchick! And snuggles and hearty handshakes from all on the left.
