Across the major evening network newscasts, there was no mention of the accusations of plagiarism against embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay, already under fire due to her flippant responses to questions on whether a call for the genocide of Jews is violative of campus rules.
This coverage sample, from NBC, makes mention of the responses, the calls to dismiss, and the Harvard faculty letter supporting Gay. But there is no mention of plagiarism.
STEPHANIE GOSK: Saturday, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from her post. During the hearing, both presidents testified that calls for the genocide of Jews did not necessarily violate their campus rules.
CLAUDINE GAY: It can be depending on the context.
U.S. REP. ELISE STEFANIK (R-NY): It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign.
GOSK: President Gay later apologizing, clarifying that calls for genocide were vile and have no place at Harvard. Now a letter signed by more than 700 faculty members urges the university's top governing body to resist political pressures, including calls for the removal of president Gay.
The clip is representative of the tone and tenor of the respective reports that aired on NBC and CBS. This is more than can be said for ABC, which didn’t cover anything related to the elite university scandal over this apparent nonchalance towards antisemitism and outright eliminationism.
And, as mentioned earlier, none of these reports mentioned the plagiarism scandal that exploded today on social media. As reported in The New York Post:
Embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay is fending off accusations she plagiarized numerous portions of her 1997 Ph.D. thesis in direct violation of Harvard’s academic integrity policies.
Documents obtained by journalists Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet posted on X juxtapose political scientist Gay’s paper with earlier works of several authors and academic scholars, which in some passages are replicated nearly word-for-word.
In one example, taken from page 12 of Gay’s dissertation, Rufo points out the now-Harvard president seemingly “lifts an entire paragraph” from a 1990 paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam.
Appearing in Bobo and Gilliam’s original paper, published seven years before Gay wrote her thesis, is the phrase “blacks in high-black-empowerment areas–as indicated by control of the mayor’s office–are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.”
Then in Gay’s paper she writes “African-Americans in ‘high black-empowerment’ areas–as indicated by control of the mayor’s office — are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.”
It appears that the governing boards have decided not to terminate Claudine Gay, and that she will not resign. Further proof of the corruption of our elite institutions. The networks chose not to report on the plagiarism that Harvard seems unwilling to penalize.
For the NBC transcript: click here
For the CBS transcript: click here
For the ABC transcript: NOPE
