Last month, the liberal media outlets CNN and Politico published stories debasing Monica Crowley’s long and successful career as a reporter.
These articles portrayed Crowley, a former Fox News contributor and editor for The Washington Times, as a serial plagiarist.
Following the scandal by the liberal media, she was forced to turn down a position in the White House.
However, a fellow Washington Times writer Ken Allard and the National Review’s Andrew Mccarthy are defending her and are reporting evidence proving this was a “major hit job.”
First, Allard points out that why would someone who was slated to be the deputy national security advisor to Donald Trump plagiarize?
So it’s unlikely that Crowley would do such a thing, not only because many know her as an honest journalist, but also because the chances are she would have gotten caught. No journalist wants to lose creditability.
Not to mention, she was exceptional at her job.
“Over the last two decades, Monica has been one of the most effective commentators on the national scene regarding the geopolitical challenges confronting the United States, and in particular the phenomenon of jihadist terror catalyzed by sharia-supremacist ideology — radical Islam. As much as anyone I’ve encountered, she has been invaluable: communicating the threats, debating them, and defending sensible national-security measures,” writes Mccarthy.
“All writers make mistakes. But Monica’s have been blown wildly out of proportion, to the point of smear. The well-regarded copyright attorney Lynn Chu has done a careful study of the plagiarism allegations and posted her findings on Facebook.’
CNN told a false narrative. First, the correct context was not presented to the readers. The passages outlined by CNN are only a small fraction of the “long, heavily researched, synthetic work[s]” according to Chu.
CNN also purposely did not mention that Crowley’s work included footnotes. In reference to the dissertation, CNN claimed 37 of the passages were stolen from others without sourcing, but actually 26 of those were found “straightforwardly false” by Chu.
“Ms. Crowley’s paraphrases were correctly sourced in her footnotes. But in most of these 26, CNN had omitted her footnote references. CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source. Readers were disabled from being allowed to see or infer that sources were in footnotes. It seemed to selectively delete footnote references (though some were left in) — perhaps so that readers would assume no visible reference mark meant no footnote existed,” writes Chu.
In reference to her 2012 book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened” 57 of 61 passages pointed out by CNN were found to be “unwarranted accusations” of plagiarism.
“The match often seemed computer-generated from shared proper names and generic phrases, or news and anecdotes repeated by aggregators and editorialists. This type of material is generally considered fair use and/or public domain. As a result, this CNN list was misleadingly long, possibly a calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false, bulk.,” writes Chu.
Ultimately, after an in-depth analysis of Crowley’s work and CNN’s claims, Chu has proven that the network create an ill-supported and mostly false narrative.
“I found CNN’s splashy “plagiarism” accusation to be ill-supported — a heavily exaggerated, political hit job. Instead, after reading texts side by side with footnotes, I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall. Many parallels in fact read on the page as rather different even if certain content or phrases were the same, and they were largely short, fragmentary, and routine,” writes Chu.
“Historical research inevitably draws heavily on the work of other scholars. Dissertations exist to synthesize. The relatively few examples of unsourced copying found was in my opinion de minimus, should just be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.”
And now a reporter’s career has been ruined and coming back from that isn’t easy.
Allard points to a similar example when the New York Times falsely exposed “the Rumsfeld Pentagon of stage-managing news about the war on terror, suborning television’s military analysts with privileged access and trips to the combat zones.”
These network military analysts were eventually exonerated after almost four years of investigations by federal agencies. But, the New York Times never apologized for this major mishap.
Now, CNN has attempted to disparaged the Trump administration by disgracing Crowley, but instead has proven Trump’s point that the network reports “fake news.”
Trump’s administration has seen right through CNN all along, especially when it came to the Crowley scandal.
“HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller,” said a Trump transition team to CNN. “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”