Yesterday I reported on the blogger Godless Spellchecker‘s report that the atheist journalist C. J. Werleman had apparently plagiarized some of his prose from at least half a dozen sources. Werleman’s purloined wording was, to my mind, quite blatant. In response, Werleman first argued that he’d done nothing wrong: that he was just citing “facts” (which happened be cited in the same words as the original sources), or that his “plagiarisms” were clichés that didn’t need citation. Here’s his rather haughty response in the comments:
How extraordinary. The first is from the study the piece spoke to those exact findings. These are the citations of the facts from that study.
The second WTF are you talking about?: “The findings of the Flinders University study are supported by the research conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, which was partly funded by the Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Agency. The authors, Robert A. Pape.”
The third is a commonly used cliche. “War for every reason. A reason for every war.”
The fourth is another commonly used cliche when speaking to Iran’s anti-Israel strategy: “Khomeini’s strategy had always been that Iran had to be more Arab than the Arabs…”
Finally, here’s a quote from Hitchens: “Plagiarism = that most obvious and banal discovery of the literary truth.
The last bit is a lame excuse for stealing words. Hitch was surely referring to borrowing ideas rather than words. Further, the “War for every reason” phrase doesn’t seem to me to be a cliché, for, when I Googled it, it turned up in only one place: the source from which Wereleman is accused of lifting it. And I don’t buy the notion that using the exact words as your source is simply citing “facts,” and is therefore okay.
A bit later Werleman admits that he did lift a quote, and for some reason forgot to cite it because of “sloppiness”. He also says that because he did cite surces in other places, this somehow mitigates the plagiarism: an argument I find unconvincing.
On further thought, I have no excuse for the OECD ‘Education Failing’s’ quote. Why I hadn’t enclosed that, I don’t know. It should’ve been. Very sloppy. But if you look over the entire body of my work, you’ll see that all of my op-eds are riddled with citations and quotes.
But that’s not the end of it. As one often finds when pursuing a writer who uses other people’s words, the problem is deeper than it first appears. Or so it appears from a post by Michael Luciano in yesterday’s The Daily Banter, “New Atheist-basher and plagiarizer apparently thinks it’s no big deal.”
Luciano, in a series of updates, finds at least 7 more cases in which Werleman appears to have lifted words from other people without attribution. This suggests that there may be many more cases that haven’t yet been uncovered. I’ll cite just four of the new ones:
UPDATE I:
Chuck Thompson, Better Off Without ‘Em, 2012:
“‘Public schools have been the great leveler of America. They were our great achievement. Universal education for all.’”
Werleman, Salon, May 5, 2014:
“During the New Deal era of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America. They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all…”
Werleman mentions Thompson’s book, but he gives no indication these are not his own words.
***
UPDATE III:
The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers, (Report by People for the American Way) 2011:
“Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology,’ the Religious Right has become more aggressive and fanatical in its defense of corporations and denial of climate science.”
Werleman, Alternet, November 18, 2013:
“Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology, the Christian Right has become increasingly aggressive in its defense of corporations and its denial of climate change.”
Werleman does not mention the report or give any indication that these are not his words.
***
UPDATE IV:
Pew Research Report, May 24, 2013:
“In fact, the percentage of Americans who say they could not afford the food needed by their families at some point in the last year is three times that in Germany, more than twice that in Italy and Canada.”
Werleman, Alternet, December 9, 2013:
“In fact, the percentage of Americans who say they could not afford the food needed to feed their families at some point in the last year is three times that of Germany, more than twice than Italy and Canada.”
Werleman does not cite the Pew Report or give any indication that these are not his words. [JAC: Here the wording of the original and duplicate differs only by about four words!]
Luciano also cites one case in which Werleman might have lifted prose from the frequent object of his ire: Sam Harris himself! But I’ll let you look at that supposedly plagiarized quote.
***
Here’s one more case, in which Wereleman appears to have used wording from—of all places—Wikipedia: an undergraduate mistake!:
UPDATE VII
Wikipedia entry on the National Union Party:
“The temporary name was used to attract War Democrats and Border State Unionists who would not vote for the Republican Party.
“…The National Union Party was created in 1864 prior the end of the Civil War. A faction of anti-Lincoln Radical Republicans held the belief that Lincoln was incompetent, and therefore could not be re-elected. A number of Radical Republicans formed a party called the Radical Democracy Party. The party nominated incumbent President Abraham Lincoln and former Democrat Andrew Johnson, who were elected in a landslide.”
Werleman, Alternet, February 12, 2014:
“In 1864, prior to the end of the Civil War, a faction of radical Republicans believed President Lincoln was incompetent, and therefore unelectable. These anti-abolition extremists broke away from the establishment under the name Radical Democracy Party, while Lincoln and establishment Republicans created the National Union Party with the intent of attracting War Democrats and Border State Unionists who would not have ordinarily voted for the Republican Party.
“The party nominated incumbent President Lincoln alongside a Democrat — Andrew Johnson. The rebranded establishment ticket went on to win the 1864 election in a landslide.”
Werleman does not mention Wikipedia or a cite any references for this information.
Luciana notes that this is ironic in view of a tw**t Werleman made last year about Rand Paul’s similar theft:
I predict that Werleman will find reasons to excuse this shameful theft of other people’s words, and will not be contrite, but continue his usual pattern of obstreperous and aggressive behavior.
But as the number of cases mount, he looks worse and worse. If he is to maintain any credibility, he’s going to have to apologize. You can get away with saying you “forgot” to attribute a single quote, but when it’s more than a dozen (and I predict others will follow), that won’t wash. What is bizarre is that he must have had some of the sources before him as he wrote, and wasn’t even savvy enough to put the facts in his own words.
Salon and Alternet have a duty to not only report Werleman’s plagiarism, which appears ironclad at this point, but to take action against him. If they don’t ban him from their pages, I won’t necessarily be surprised (my opinion of Salon is lower than a snake’s belly), but I will certainly stop citing them. Failure to deep-six a plagiarizing writer is a serious breach of journalistic ethics. You can argue that Salon and Alternet are not journalistic venues, but that’s not how they present themselves. ~
I used to work at a newspaper. A reporter once plagiarized one paragraph of an article. He maintained he simply forgot to cite it. Either way, he was fired the same day as the discovery.
Here’s a simple test for Werleman to consider: if I wanted to quote something I had read in his writing and it happened to be one of the examples cited above or in the previous post (and I didn’t know about these plagiarism allegations), to whom should I give credit in my citation? To Werleman?
He’s all flustered now – he has been tweeting at Sam Harris accusing him of plagiarism. He’s so childish, he should consider becoming a world leader.
Lol!
Or a Republican.
😀
That “laughie” was supposed to be a reply to Diana, but it does apply to both of you. 🙂
“He’s so childish, he should consider becoming a world leader.”
Or maybe more modestly start as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, perhaps a la John “I-Don’t-Have-To-Let-Her-Answer!” Shimkus, R-IL.
In all seriousness, given that he is a shameless liar, plagiarist and bullshit artist, he is a prime candidate for public office.
“…lower than a snake’s belly…”
I looked that up, and it is common usage, but it is the first time I have heard it. I like this version even better:
“lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut”
“Lower than whale shit” is as low as you can get.
I didn’t know that whale shit sank…
Is this the apology you were looking for?
*****
“My 55 salon/alternet op-eds amounted to 65,000 words. 4 editing errors + 2 unquoted stats. I take full responsibility and I’m deeply sorry.”
Tw**t ~CJ Werleman approx 45 min ago
Then
****
“See my apology. Rather than tweet, which will do no one no justice, I’ll post column of what is likely @SamHarrisOrg lifting Steyn’s work.”
Tw**t ~CJ Werleman
Salon has abandoned all pretense of journalistic integrity. As for Mr. Werleman, it seems a regular pattern of behavior and attitude that will serve him well in the “plus” crowd.
Up to 11 additional instances now at the source post…
When Werleman tweeted the notapology above about “only 4 + 2 instances”, was he REALLY so naive to think people wouldn’t keep digging? Or is he so deluded he honestly doesn’t think he plagiarised much?
Staggering o_O
If I were using DABDA as the scale, I’d say CJ’s somewhere between denial and anger.
Advice to CJ:
It’s ok to be proud of an achievement, but its fairly important to have an achievement first.
I’ve found the clashes and splintering between atheists disheartening. Certainly one of the good things about “free-thinking” is that we ought to be able to challenge each other’s views. But too often I’m finding a lot of clashes of personalities, where you just have one writer going after the character of another. This especially seems inflamed in twitter feuds. (Not to mention the fractious “in group/out group” thinking on the free-thought blogs).
Certainly plagiarism is a serious issue. But impetus behind how this all came up seems to be along the lines of “This guy is criticizing/slurring Sam Harris…so what kind of dirt can we dig up about HIM?”
It becomes less about issues, more about attacks on the character of the other guy.
I’m a big fan of Sam, and no one stays more calm and collected in a debate than he does.
But when it comes to blogging and tweeting, I wish he would succumb less often to the personality feuds. Twitter almost seems designed for such easy snipping.
It should be no surprise that atheists are diverse on things like social issues and views of leadership. The various leader-types are trying to herd cats, which creates clashes, but I would rather be a cat than a sheep.
The good thing about debate is to test ideas, whether they are diametrically opposed, or are similar but with finer distinctions.
In this case, Werleman’s “ideas” have been tested and found in many instances to not be his own. For a professional writer or for one who claims to be an intellectual or original thinker, this is a mortal sin.
He is now disqualified from being part of the debate. It is good to get rid of the deadwood right off the bat.
Bats hate having dead wood on them; I know this because of consciousness. 🙂 oh how I packed that sentence with gems!
One thing I think can be noticed about these clashes (and I agree they are irksome) is that the different sides show no signs of mollifying their views in light of the arguments from the other side. Someone is right, or wrong, or partly right, or partly wrong. The people involved are supposed to be full of insight and wisdom and self-knowledge. They are supposed to say real smart things that are nuanced and accurate and … right. And yet there are several actors in our cause who sometimes say wrong things or dumb things, and when cogent reasons for why they are wrong is pointed out what do we see? We see doubling down, dismissive responses, cherry picking.
The same crap I would see on Fox news if I ever watched it.
Regarding your last lines, I am fairly sure Sam Harris had nothing to do personally with the “digging for dirt”/plagiarism finds. I’m not sure why you’re implicating him there.
Harris, in my experience, simply defends himself – vigorously, yes – with arguments against people with an agenda who are willing to lie to make their point (or are downright ignorant).
Unless you can point to a specific instance of where Harris “goes personal” against Werleman (or Affleck, or Aslan) instead of arguing, I don’t think you have grounds for your schoolground attitude that “if two are fighting they must both be equally to blame”.
I didn’t say Sam dug up the dirt on Werleman. I am quite aware it was “godlessspellchecker, which is why I wrote it as: “This guy is criticizing/slurring Sam Harris…so what kind of dirt can we dig up about HIM?” If I was directly attributing it to Sam, obviously I would have written it “This guy is criticizing/slurring ME…so what kind of dirt can I dig up on him.”
However, Sam of course has been tweeting the info to his far larger number of followers so Sam has a major role in promulgating the story. (How could he resist such a juicy stab at someone he’s having a war of words with)?
Sam has been pissed off over Werleman’s behavior in promoting a distortion of Sam’s views, “callowly sniping at me” to paraphrase Sam. If someone’s criticism of your message is inaccurate, the way you refute it is to explain how you’ve been mischaracterized…which Sam did (more so in response to Aslan’s re-tweet of simllar accusations). Going beyond that to help circulate purportedly plagiarized passages from your opponent’s other articles on subjects unrelated to the current dispute is just going after the character of the other guy. It’s obviously very tempting to be handed such a juicy morsal while in the heat of a dispute. But it IS a move that seeks to undermine the character of the other guy, rather than sticking to the argument at hand.
“Unless you can point to a specific instance of where Harris “goes personal” against Werleman (or Affleck, or Aslan) instead of arguing,”,
The authors repeat the positions they are arguing, but the point is they go beyond the issues to make it personal. You can not read the ware of words and twitter exchanges between Harris, Aslan, Werleman, Greenwald etc, and not notice the personal nature of the dispute, how they have been not just arguing their side, but including sniping at one another’s character. Aslan has gone right after Harris’ character, clearly with enmity toward Harris. Greenwald has also implied Harris is a homophobe, and Harris has called Aslan and Greenwald “unscrupulous.” It’s not that people don’t or can’t have legitimate grievances between each other; I’m just pointing out how these personal grievances start infecting the dialogue, and how the argument gets pulled into diagnosing and attacking character of the other person.
<i."I don’t think you have grounds for your schoolground attitude that “if two are fighting they must both be equally to blame”.
Now now..please don’t strawman. I never suggested any such equivalency. In fact I have myself been sucked into defending Sam against these character attacks (e.g. on some Free Thought blogs, where he has been called misogynist, sexist, an asshole to women, etc).
Whether one side has the more legitimate personal criticisms or not, my point is that I find the personal tenor of many of the heated exchanges between atheists
disheartening. People can’t seem to help going beyond the original arguments to, in some degree, discrediting the PERSON making the arguments. That’s all.
I certainly hope you don’t think I’m going after Werleman because I don’t like his atheist-bashing (which I don’t, of course)–something you imply by putting me on a “side”. If you look at my posts, I have treated Werleman no better or worse than I’ve treated other people who have been guilty of fraud or malfeasance. For example, I was fond of Marc Hauser’s work until it came out that he committed scientific fraud, and then I reported quite a bit about that critically,up to his resignation from Harvard. Ditto for Jonah Lehrer: I had no beef with him except that I didn’t often like his implications that most of science was wrong, but he wasn’t an atheist-basher.
Plariarism is beyond the pale for anyone.
I am not quite sure why you seen to find the “personal behavior” almost more odious than the plagiarism itself. I suppose a bit of Schadenfreude pervades Sam’s comments (and really, can’t you excuse a bit of that), but the important story is that a journalist has been caught plagiarizing, and the examples are up to a dozen now.
Werleman undermined his own character. Sam is within bounds sharing that, since the former’s lack of veracity may also apply to some of the things he’s said about Sam.
Also, Sam calling the others “unscrupulous” seems quite reasonable after they’ve called him a homophobe, misogynist, sexist, etc.
All of us are against plagiarism. But there are all sorts of things we think are serious that don’t necessarily relate to a particular argument.
By Sam’s own admission he’d never heard of Werleman, wasn’t even on Sam’s radar. While Sam surely thinks plagiarism is a bad thing, I see no reason to think Sam would have bothered re-tweeting to his audience accusations of plagiarism that had nothing to do with Sam’s writing, involving an atheist Sam had no interest in to begin with. It’s only that Sam had become involved the type of character-questioning dispute with Werleman that seems to give motivation to his tweeting about the plagiarism accusations.
Once the dispute involves the other guy’s character, you can always hold up new negative info on the opponent as being pertinent because “look how it speaks to the character and veracity of the guy attacking me.”
As I said, my position isn’t that certain personal grievances aren’t legitimate, or that one person isn’t being more scrupulous than another (again, I have defended Sam against what I found to be unscrupulous
characterizations of his writing).
It’s the personal nature overlaying many of these disputes that I find disheartening.
There is a personal-sniping tenor to the exchanges in so many of the atheist on-line interactions, twitter being particular built for snide exchanges.
The example of Werleman and Sam being one example. I think my distaste for these scenarios began with becoming so turned off by the personal-attack nature of some of the freethought atheist blogs. Whether it’s one virtuous side being pulled into these disputes by the actions of an unscrupulous opponent or not, it still ends up ugly when things get personal. I’m just losing my taste for it, I think.
The extract about the election from Wikipedia doesn’t make sense– it seems to contradict itself (no surprise to me). Werleman’s statement actually makes sense, so he must have been supplying information from some other source.
Maybe he plagiarized a source that plagiarized Wikipedia? That would be sort of funny.
As David Duncan notes below, there are parts of Werleman’s statement that don’t make sense either.
Sub
Wait, he plagiarized Fareed Zakaria? Wasn’t he accused of plagiarism, too?
This is catching faster than ebola!
This simply will not do, you are criticizing the ideas and actions of this Werleman person rather that indulging in baseless character assassination.
And speaking of actions, back at the original The Daily Banter article, Werleman has taken to responding to negative comments by copy/pasting the unchanged original comment as a reply. I stopped counting after 15 such replies. Perhaps this is just reflex action on his part, he just can’t stop himself.
I believe the plagiarizing commenter at The Daily Banter is someone who commandeered Werleman’s name for satirical effect.
It seemed too good to be true.
From Werleman’s “improvement” of the Wikipedia article about Radical Republicans:
“These anti-abolition extremists…”
I thought Radical Republicans were by definition pro-abolition. He can’t even pilfer from Wikipedia properly.
Some things never change: You can have faith in athesism or not.
You can have faith in God or a greater or not. They are both individual choices. Objective studies tend to support the greater entity. I’ve never seen an athesist in a foxhole! If one believes in God the worst thing that can happen is there is nothing on the other side. If one does not believe, Guess What! Evolution has been verified the last couple of hundred years by objectivtivty supporting that faith. I’ll stick with that.
drdan
1. Atheism is not a faith, it is a lack of belief in gods.
2. There are no independent studies supporting the existence of a “greater entity”.
3. There are only atheists in foxholes – if you believe in a god, you believe it is overseeing your life, which makes foxholes irrelevant. Diving into a foxhole connotes lack of faith.
4. Pascal’s Wager only works if you’ve chosen the correct god. What happens if it turns out you should have been worshipping Odin, Osiris, Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (If He isn’t real, why are all the planets shaped like meatballs?)
5. Evolution is not a faith, it is a scientific theory. Oh, and before you latch onto the word “theory”, please check out its meaning in science. Suffice to say, Gravity is just a theory too, and if you’ve lived long enough to be trolling this site, you probably haven’t ignored Germ Theory either.
To say that one has faith in atheism makes as much sense as to say that your hobby is not collecting stamps.
Very recently, on this site, we read the story of a clergyman who was coaxed into leaving his foxhole by medic for the purpose of rescuing a fellow injured soldier. The medic’s head was blown apart in the attempt. The clergyman rescued the soldier and abandoned his faith (for a time, anyway) since he couldn’t fathom God allowing the selflessly heroic medic’s life to be snuffed out. So now you heard of an atheist in a foxhole.
By the phrase “objectivtivty supporting that faith”, I assume you mean that evidence supports a theory. Faith consists of beliefs that are unsupported by and are unsupportable by evidence. The process of using evidence to support ideas is called reasoning.
The only thing missing is Godwin’s law and a quote from the non thinker’s thinker, CS Lewis… Other than that, it’s the total package.
I’m a decorated combat veteran of both Vietnam and Desert Storm. I’ve seen my share of foxholes, and I was an atheist in all of them. While you’re in the shit you have no time for fantasizing about god, you’re much too busy worrying about doing the asshole coming in over the wire.
So my question is, how many foxholes have you looked in or out of?
You can’t begin to fathom the rage I feel every time I see someone glibly reel that tired trope off thinking they are clever in some way.
I’ll leave it at that, before I break some of the roolz.
“So my question is, how many foxholes have you looked in or out of?”
You beat me to it. 🙂 I was going to add, “and how did you know their occupants weren’t atheists?”
If your beliefs are a choice then they aren’t truly your beliefs. They are simply what you claim to believe for whatever benefit you hope to gain from them.
They are simply a pious pose.
Jerry – C. J. Werleman is listed as a ‘communicator’ for the Secular Global Institute. Can you bring this up with them, please?
Seeing that Boghossian is a fellow too, as is Harris, I imagine that will already be taken care of…
Obstreperous, isn’t used enough! That’s all.
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.
I’ve just plagiarised this from Wilson Mizner (Wikipedia)
I hate to defend Werleman in any way, but I did a Google Books search on the “War for every reason” quote a few days ago, and it seems to be a somewhat commonplace saying that goes back to the mid-1980s at least. Along the lines of “It took Nixon to go to China”, which writers largely don’t source either.
But even giving him a pass on that one, he has several examples of blatant cut-paste-and-change-a-few-words plagiarism that are in no way defensible.
More generally, I’ve been seeing this Werleman guy’s name come up a lot over the last month or so, and he really rubs me the wrong way. He’s somebody who’s written a few highly derivative New Atheist books, and is now making a career out of denouncing New Atheist big names in incredibly inflammatory ways, in the usual snarky pseudo-liberal platforms like Salon. He’s just somebody just looking for a bandwagon to jump on with an eye for self-promotion.
He strikes me as cut from the same cloth as Hugo Schwyzer and Charles Clymer, two other narcissists who have latched onto an increasingly popular social movement (in their case feminism) for their own self-aggrandizement. It doesn’t take very long for the true colors of such types to shine through.
Oops – I see that the essay by Broyles *is* the mid-80s mention I was thinking of, and in fact that not that many people have quoted it since – it has not entered the language as a commonplace saying. Werlman definitely should have cited it.
In all seriousness, given that he is a shameless liar, plagiarist and bullshit artist, he is a prime candidate for public office.