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The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges
Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist

"The Transformation at the Heart of Biden’s Middle-Out Economic Agenda
The economy is not about money; it’s about people.
by Nick Hanauer
February 9, 2023 ".

There had to be good reasons why i had dropped out of Hedges.
Thanks to the computer keeping a history of stuff read, now i know.


YouTube/Screenshot

Christopher Ketcham/
June 12, 2014

In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic—poverty—that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times, where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute .. http://www.nationinstitute.org/fellows/1328/chris_hedges/ . He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in the widely read progressive website Truthdig and frequently republished on the Truthout website. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling American Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.

A leading moralist of the left, however, had now been caught plagiarizing at one of the oldest magazines of the left.

Ross and the fact-checker, who remains an editor at the magazine and asked that his name not be used in this story, sat down to discuss the matter before approaching Ellen Rosenbush, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, and Rick MacArthur, the publisher, who knew Hedges personally. The fact-checker was assigned to speak to Hedges about the material lifted from Matt Katz. According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges told them that he had shared the draft with Katz, who, Hedges claimed, had approved his use of Katz’s language and reporting. (Rosenbush and MacArthur declined to comment on the record for this article.)

But when the editors at Harper’s asked Katz about Hedges’s account, Katz told them he had not in fact seen the manuscript. “When I went back to Hedges, he tried to clarify by saying he didn’t mean that he had actually showed Katz the draft,” the fact-checker said. “He lied to me—lied to his fact-checker.”

At this point, Ross said, he brought the matter to Rosenbush, and together—after a series of meetings that included the fact-checker, literary editor Ben Metcalf, and MacArthur—they decided Harper’s could no longer stand behind the piece.

“I do not believe I shared a text with Matt Katz, but this was a few years ago,” Hedges wrote to me when I asked him about this account. “I know I spoke with him several times as he wrote the series and covered Camden.” Katz told me that he did not remember seeing a draft, and he confirmed speaking with a Harper’s fact-checker. He declined to comment further.

The plagiarism at Harper’s was not an isolated incident. Hedges has a history of lifting material from other writers that goes back at least to his first book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, published in 2002. He has echoed language from Nation author Naomi Klein. He has lifted lines from radical social critic Neil Postman. He has even purloined lines from Ernest Hemingway.

The unraveling of the Camden article occurred over the course of several weeks. “The more we dug into it, and the more we looked back at the early drafts,” Ross said, “the more we began to see that this could not have been anything but intentional. Specific language, specific sentence structure, specific topics. He went to all the same places as this reporter [Matt Katz], and talked to the same people. Some of it was just taken from the reporter’s articles. There were sentences that were exactly the same.” I asked Harper’s for a copy of Hedges’s original manuscript, for comparison with Katz’s published pieces, but the magazine’s policy is not to share unpublished work of its writers.

“The Katz stuff was flat out plagiarism,” says the Harper’s fact-checker. “At least twenty instances of sentences that were exactly the same. Three grafs where a ‘that’ was changed to a ‘which.’” The fact-checker reiterated to me that first-person accounts in Hedges’s draft had him quoting the same sources as in Katz’s pieces, with the sources using exactly the same wording as in Katz’s pieces. “Hedges not only used another journalist’s quotes,” says the fact-checker, “but he used them in first-person scenes, claiming he himself gathered the quotes. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen as a fact-checker at the magazine. And it was endemic throughout the piece.”

The fact-checker spoke on the phone with Hedges at least three times and exchanged about a dozen e-mails with him. “He was very unhelpful from the beginning, and very aggressive,” said the fact-checker. Hedges repeatedly claimed he had done original reporting. “Hedges reassured me there were no problems,” said Ross. “He then went to the fact-checker and tried to intimidate him and give him a hard time. Hedges told him, ‘Why are you going to the editor?’”

The fact-checker told me, “Not only was the plagiarism more egregious than I had seen before, but it was shocking how unapologetic Hedges was when it was put in his face. He got very heavy-handed about it. He kept claiming that the people quoted in the Katz piece gave him the exact same quotes.”

According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges then tried to circumvent their questions by appealing privately to Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur, who at the time was a personal friend.

“After it became clear that we had a serious problem, the reaction at the magazine was admirable,” Ross said. “Ellen brought me in to talk to Hedges on the phone when we killed it. He was very upset. He didn’t believe he did anything wrong. It was a hostile conversation between the three of us. It got heated. I said words to the effect of ‘Chris, we’re doing you a favor here. You don’t want to go out with that kind of work. Because you’ll get caught. Someone is going to catch you.’ I thought it was all pretty sad. Here was a chance to do a creative, smart, impactful story on poverty and we lost it because he wasn’t willing to do the work.” Hedges has not been invited to write for Harper’s again.

Hedges made his name on the left with his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning .. http://www.amazon.com/war-force-that-gives-meaning/dp/1400034639/saloncom08-20 , considered a classic about the psychological effects of combat. When a University of Texas classics professor named Thomas Palaima read the book, he was initially enthused. Palaima teaches a course on the human experience of war and wanted to include Hedges as required reading in his syllabus. “I read War from a sympathetic progressive standpoint,” Palaima said. “I admired his courage as a reporter and his general moral stance against, to my mind, morally unjustifiable wars.”

But in poring over the book, he had come across a passage that sounded disturbingly familiar. On page 40 of the hardcover first edition, Hedges writes:

In combat the abstract words glory, honor, courage often become obscene and empty. They are replaced
by the tangible images of war, the names of villages, mountains, roads, dates, and battalions.

The rhythm of the language, the ideas, and the sentiment, Palaima concluded, were from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms .. http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-To-Arms-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/0684801469/saloncom08-20 . The passage in A Farewell to Arms reads:

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names
of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates.

Finding no citation of Hemingway in Hedges’s text, endnotes or bibliography, Palaima alerted Hedges’s publishing house, PublicAffairs, in an e-mail dated June 8, 2003, as to what he hoped was “an inadvertent plagiarism.” Over the next few weeks, he corresponded with the company's founder and CEO, Peter Osnos, who assured him that the passage had already been altered for future editions.

Thus, on page 40 of the paperback edition, the text now reads:

With much too much more .. https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer-winner-lefty-hero-plagiarist