Thursday, March 18, 2010

Probable plagiarism at the CABPRO Report

In my previous post I reported that CABPRO executive director Martin Light had declined to say who "CABPRO Staff" were, that he's giving authorship credit to for posts like today's "Den of Thieves".

Well, we seem to have at least a partial answer: Googling some of the "Den of Thieves" text brings up a Reno fellow's Nov. 2009 blog post titled - surprise - "Den of Thieves", and with the same content. The blogger doesn't take credit for writing it, saying "...this came through my Inbox and I thought it was worth pondering".

So, assuming the blogger did receive it via email, there are two possibilites: first, that CABPRO staff is actually composing and sending out those "pass it on" right wing emails (which is possible, but seems is extremely (*) unlikely) - or that the CABPRO folks consider authorship and attribution information to be, well, cosmetic.
...which would indicate a rather laissez-faire attitude toward accuracy, that readers would do well to keep in mind.

I'm asking, & will report back what I hear about which of these possibilities actually happened.


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Why this matters: CABPRO is the caliber of organization whose blog sports a category for "Globull warming" - it seems they're the kind of folks who're happy to disregard the science and put their own children at risk (pdf) - and yours - if it lets them score short-term political points.
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3 comments:

  1. Anna Haynes3/19/2010 10:58 AM

    I did a bit of quick research and found 5 of the 6 "by CABPRO Staff" posts on the CABPRO Report home page appear to have been reprinted without attribution from pre-existing content on other sites.

    (Caveat - these counts may be off by one or two, since I didn't invest the time to double-check my work.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anna Haynes3/19/2010 11:12 AM

    p.s. not quite that bad; for some posts it may just be the omission of quotation marks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna Haynes3/20/2010 7:32 PM

    Comment moderation over in CABPRO territory seems to be as slow as, well, fill in the blank - I submitted one Thurs evening and one Fri afternoon, on the "Den of Thieves" post, and as of Saturday evening, neither one has appeared.

    Perhaps it's a technical error? in case that's so, I'll reprint the comment here, so the CABPRO fellows can see it:

    Thank you [CABPRO Executive Director] Martin for this calm and civil response. I do look forward to hearing the explanation from CABPRO Staff.

    Could you tell me when the CABPRO office would be open, for me to stop by and look at some back issues of the newsletter? It seems the CABPRO website's newsletter archive ( cabpro.org/CABPRO/CABPRO_News_Magazine.html ) only goes back to Oct. 2008.
    (If you're not able to be there, perhaps CABPRO Staff could open the office?)

    Posted by: Anna Haynes | March 19, 2010 at 01:51 PM

    ReplyDelete

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