Inaccuracy in Media
Thanks to Townhall.com: Issues, I found this troubling Campus Report Online piece, "Coulter 1: UCONN 0."
It begins routinely enough:
Coulter 1: UCONN 0
by: Deborah Lambert, December 16, 2005
Although media coverage of Ann Coulter’s much ballyhooed speech at U.Conn. was designed to make the public believe that Coulter lost ground to radical students, in fact it was just the opposite, as demonstrated by a report in HumanEventsonline on December 12, 2005.
And then Deborah quotes from that piece by Lisa De Pasquale which we commented on last week. Your task is to determine when you think the quoting from Lisa's work ends.
“In reality, Coulter used her wit to disarm the hecklers. She conversed with the audience for more than 30 minutes, more than what was scheduled. One boy obnoxiously asked, ‘What do you think of premarital sex?’ Coulter responded, ‘Honestly, that’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.’
Despite their attempts and false media accounts of the lecture, it was the hecklers in the audience who were angered, agitated and storming away from the microphone. In How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Coulter wrote, “People don’t get angry when lies are told about them; they get angry when the truth is told about them.”
What happened at UConn last week is not a new phenomenon. For years conservatives have battled a repertoire of name-calling, teach-ins, protests and projectiles. Judging from the four or five snot-nosed kids protesting at UConn, their mainstay now is the Hitler mustache. Liberals must wake up every day and thank Hitler’s barber for providing enough material to sustain them for the past 65 years.
Conservative speakers such as Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz, Bay Buchanan and Ward Connerly continue to put themselves in the lion’s den because of the support they receive from thousands of college students and in spite of the cowardly loudmouths in the back of the room. Many of them travel with close protection bodyguards because they want to continue speaking out in support of conservative principles and the War on Terrorism. Conservative students are desperate for intellectual diversity, so they stand up to the administration, their liberal professors and fellow students with a rebellious spirit, creativity and a sense of humor. Liberals’ rants are no match for affirmative-action bake sales at numerous colleges, Clothe-A-Feminist Day (in response to a protest led by naked feminists) at the University of North Texas and Coming Out [as a conservative] Week at Drake University. Repartee with Ann Coulter is just kicking them when their down. It’s really not a fair fight.
Conservative students are winning on college campuses. In addition to their efforts, they have a number of outstanding organizations such as Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute, the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, Students for Academic Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to encourage them along the way. Liberal students have the Hitler mustache and their poorly drawn swastikas.
UConn liberals made a spectacle of themselves…though their tactics were ineffective in getting Ann Coulter to leave the stage, they deprived their fellow students from hearing the end of an interesting and thought-provoking speech. Instead, the majority of the students laughed along with Coulter at their fellow students. It was similar to the “worst auditions” episode of "American Idol." Those at the microphones were emotional, pitiful and angry -- and also oblivious to the laughing observers.
Miss Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia’s monthly Campus Report newsletter.
You'll note that the first paragraph after the mention of the Human Events Online piece begins with double quotation marks. There are single quotation marks for direct quotes from the original article. Then, in the next paragraph, it's back to double quotation marks for the line from Ann's book.
So, when do you think that Deborah stopped quoting Lisa's piece?
If you said after that first paragraph, the one that began with the quotation mark (even though it lacked a double quotation mark at the end), you're wrong. In truth, everything after Deborah's introductory paragraph (right until we hit bio line) is lifted directly from Lisa's piece. (I know that Deborah didn't give you any clues to indicate that this was the case, but we talking about conservatives here, so you should have guessed.)
Yes, Deborah provided just one original paragraph (which is itself a paraphrased version of Lisa's opening paragraph), and copied everything else from Lisa's Human Events Online piece -- and then had it published as a "Perspectives" column at Campus Report Online, which is Accuracy in Media's "online news service." That's accuracy for you!
Okay, your next challenge: give your best guess as to Deborah's background. Is she another Nicole Krogman, a Campus Republican who never got around to completing that course on journalistic ethics, and so can't be expected to know how about plagiarism? Or is she instead a Lisa De Pasquale, a middle-aged woman working as a conservative "mentor" to college students whose writing resembles that of an inept college student?
You can find the answer here:
Deborah Lambert, Director of Special Projects, oversees the area of fundraising and donor relations for AIM. She is also a board member of Accuracy In Academia and writes a column for AIA's monthly publication, Campus Report. A former antique dealer and freelance writer, she has served as AIM's Public Relations Director and producer of AIM's weekly TV show, The Other Side of the Story. Ms. Lambert was born and raised in Connecticut, and holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University
I hope the members of the English Department at Columbia are properly ashamed of themselves.
BTW -- As you read Deborah's piece, you might have thought that she made at least one change in Lisa's text, since the last line no longer contains the information that the angry UConn students were "in some cases, homosexual (or they appeared that way to me, but they could have just been college liberals)".
However, it seems that somebody at Human Events Online must have had second thoughts about that childish and hateful remark, because when we now check Lisa's column, we see that it's been excised from her piece. You know, if this had happened to Ann Coulter, she'd be calling some editors girly-boys right now ...
2:10:03 AM 
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