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.
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:
POLLS AND PROLES The Democrats Lost Some Working-Class Support in the Midterms
More evidence to debunk B402's selfish Dem denial posturing.
"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"
The midterms failed to produce the predicted red wave, but the working class’s migration to the GOP continued, and that isn’t good news for the Democrats.
The standard demographic shorthand for working-class voters is “non-college voter.” Nationally, exit polls show the Democrats lost a significant five percentage points among this group. In 2018 and 2020, Democrats captured 49 and 48 percent of non-college voters, a significant improvement on the 43 percent they won in the annus horribilis of 2016. In all three of these previous elections, Republicans won 49 or 50 percent of the non-college vote. But in 2022 .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/exit-polls .. the Democrats were back to 43 percent of the non-college vote, and Republicans won 55 percent, which is actually more than they won in 2016.
The shift was not among non-college white voters. These white working-class voters have been identified as a core MAGA constituency, most especially the men. White working-class voters went 66 percent for Donald Trump in 2016 and 67 percent for Trump in 2020. The same percentage of white working-class voters, 66 percent, voted Republican in 2022. (White working-class Trump support dipped to 61 percent in the 2018 midterms, but we can set that aside as the usual midterm disaffection with the presidential party.) This consistency in white working-class voting patterns means the Democrats’ slippage from 48 or 49 percent to 43 percent of the working-class vote, and the GOP’s corresponding gain from 49 or 50 percent to 55 percent, represents a shift among nonwhite working-class voters. That probably reflects mainly a shift among working-class Latinos. After swinging toward Republicans by eight percentage points in 2020, all Latinos (not just working-class Latinos) swung a couple more percentage points toward the GOP in 2022. As my New Republic colleagues Tori Otten .. https://newrepublic.com/post/168697/latino-voters-did-not-abandon-democrats-election-support .. and Michael Tomasky .. https://newrepublic.com/article/168691/liberal-media-got-really-wrong-midterms-red-wave-narrative .. point out, this was not the major realignment some may have feared. But the shift among working-class Latinos was probably larger than the shift among all Latinos, and there may have been some shift among working-class Blacks as well.
An important caveat: Demographic breakdowns in exit polls tend to be a bit shaky. We’ll have better numbers from the census later on. The trends I’m describing here are the best we can do today, but we’ll be able to do better several months from now (when everybody’s paying a lot less attention).
AFL-CIO spokesman Steve Smith acknowledged the Democrats’ working-class losses.
[Insert: Yet another refutation of B402's oft-debunked Democrat denial furphy. ]
“The turnout in 2022 was not as high, obviously, as in a presidential race,” he said, “and there’s a deeper frustration, I think, on economic issues. If the numbers are a little off … those are things that would explain that.” Smith said Republicans talked mostly about crime and inflation, while Democrats talked mostly about democracy and abortion, so “it wasn’t your typical election in that respect.” Talking about democracy and abortion may have served, for the electorate as a whole, to minimize the Democrats’ midterm losses, but not necessarily for working-class voters.They might have preferred more talk about the infrastructure bill and Republican plans to cut Social Security and Medicare.
[Again it's more about messaging. B402 founders and fails on any paltry policy positions debate.]
There is a little bit of good news in the exit polls regarding the Democrats’ working-class constituency, or what’s left of it. Democratic support among union households is holding steady.
[And there for mine in the true working man. The union member sees more of the big picture than does the one who decides to save himself money by not paying union dues.]
In 2016 Hillary Clinton won only 51 percent of voters from union households, the smallest percentage of any Democratic presidential nominee since the Reagan era. That was terrifying. But it had less to do with union households supporting Trump than with union households abhorring Clinton; the votes Clinton lost went mainly to third-party candidates. By 2018, union households were back to supporting Democrats at the usual rate of about 55 percent. In 2020 Joe Biden won 56 percent of union households, and in 2022 Democrats won 57 percent.
There were some initial reports that in Ohio, Democrat Tim Ryan failed to win a clear majority of union households in his unsuccessful Senate race against the world-historic phony .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162548/jd-vance-populist-fraud-ohio .. J.D. Vance. That would have been a shock, because Ryan ran a pretty effective pro-labor campaign. But the initial reports turned out to be wrong. Ryan won union households by 57 percent, in line with the national trend. Ohio is a traditionally pro-union state, so it’s important for Democrats to keep winning union households there. Sadly, it is no longer a national leader in union membership; 17 states have higher union density now than Ohio, including, improbably, Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island. (Remember that a larger proportion of the workforce in states with small populations work for state and local government, where union membership is much more common than in the private sector.)
It’s also worth noting that although the Democratic Party has come to be dominated by the professional classes and even to some extent by Wall Street, the midterm results demonstrate that it’s an oversimplification to say that it’s the party of the prosperous. It all depends, obviously, on how you break these things down, but in the midterms, exit polls show .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/exit-polls-2022-elections/ .. Democrats won a 52 percent majority of voters from households earning $52,000 or less; only a 45 percent minority of voters from households earning $55,000 to $99,000; and a 46 percent minority of voters earning $100,000 or more. It may make people earning $100,000 uncomfortable for me to say so, but if you pull down that salary, then you’re wealthier than two-thirds of the U.S. population, and if you divide the population evenly into “poor,” “middle class,” and “rich,” then you are, inescapably, rich. So don’t act surprised that your cohort favors Republicans over Democrats. If you set the threshold higher, then yes, you can probably find an income cohort of doctors and lawyers and such where the majority votes Democratic. But if you set the threshold even higher to capture the extremely rich, a majority will reliably vote Republican.
What does this add up to? The Democrats mustn’t give up on representing the working class. The party of the common man (and woman) still has a fighting chance to win back their votes. And for all the Democrats’ pandering to affluent voters, not so many of these toffs vote Democratic as Tucker Carlson (estimated net worth: $30 million) would have you believe.
Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.
What feels best policy for any American political party may not be the best policy for America, and the rest of the world. What feels best for America in the short run may not be the best for the rest of the world. In that case it may not be best for America in the long run. And whatever any party's policy there will always be those who agree, and disagree. So that said, here we go on the 'bring the jobs home' chorus.
"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 "
I subscribe to this magazine and started reading the latest issue when it arrived yesterday. Below is the cover and the editorial comment.
What Made in America Means for the World
Adam Posen, Eswar Prasad, and Katherine Tai with dueling perspectives on the rise of protectionism.
By Ravi Agrawal, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.
Cover illustration by Doug Chayka for Foreign Policy
March 24, 2023, 9:43 AM
Remember when COVID-19 shut the whole world down? Memories of that period may be fading, but the pandemic has in fact altered how nations behave. Scarred by the experience of scarcity, countries have begun to safeguard their supply chains and focus on local production instead of trade. Big economies, in particular, have embarked on historic spending sprees, building out infrastructure and favoring domestic business over global competition. It’s a new era of industrial policy.
The decline of trade isn’t new, of course. So-called de-globalization has been underway since the financial crisis that began in 2007. But the pandemic sharply accelerated it and made geopolitics a central factor in economic policy, giving rise to neologisms such as friendshoring. Today, perhaps more than ever, trade policy is foreign policy.
The question is whether this new economic trend is good for the world. Answers vary—sometimes sharply—and Exhibit A in the debate is Washington’s recent decision to direct more than $400 billion of investment and subsidies toward green energy and semiconductors. Europe’s capitals have been quick to brand the United States’ moves as protectionist. Fine, butone also has to acknowledge the benefits that will come from a giant injection of cash into technologies that might just save the planet.
Part of the impetus for the White House’s policies is to compete with—and maybe even cut off—China. With economics converging on geopolitics, Foreign Policy has to wade in. So we asked Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, to assess where U.S. economic policy is headed. Posen’s argument isn’t against industrial policy—which has its benefits, he writes—so much as it is against how Washington is prioritizing domestic manufacturing over foreign competition. The United States’ moves to withdraw from trade with China, spark a subsidy race, and maximize local production over the global development of new technologies, Posen argues, fly in the face of centuries of economic theory.
Cornell University’s Eswar Prasad considers the effects on smaller economies. As China, Europe, the United States, and even countries such as India embrace industrial policies—downplaying free trade in the process—many emerging markets and poorer countries are destined to suffer, Prasad writes.
What about the Biden administration’s take? It wouldn’t be fair to air out all these criticisms without giving the White House a chance to rebut, so I sat down for an FP Live interview with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, and a transcript of that conversation appears in this issue. Tai asserts that her government’s policies are the result of democratic debate and wrangling; hers is an admission that politics is a different beast, and necessarily more practical, than the theoretical science of economics. But she also makes an eloquent case for how her government is setting out to “de-risk”—and not de-globalize—in what was already an unequal world, made more unfair by the rise of a country that doesn’t play by the same rules as everyone else. (I had to push her to say China.)
Is Posen, Prasad, or Tai correct? Read on and decide for yourself.
As always, there’s lots more in our Spring 2023 issue, beginning with our sharpest arguments from around the world. And consider our collection of essays on objects that define the world today—masks, tanks, and Joe Biden’s aviators—a chaser to the bracing shot of industrial policy debate.
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