HarperCollins pulls Trump pick Monica Crowley's book amid plagiarism revelations

[brooklynite]

Source: CNN

Publisher HarperCollins said Tuesday that it will stop selling a book by Monica Crowley that a CNN KFile investigation found to have more than 50 instances of plagiarism.

Crowley was picked by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. CNN's KFile reported Saturday that Crowley's 2012 book, "What The (Bleep) Just Happened," lifted work from columnists, news reports, articles, and think tanks.

"The book, which has reached the end of its natural sales cycle, will no longer be offered for purchase until such time as the author has the opportunity to source and revise the material," HarperCollins said in a statement to CNN's KFile.

A request for comment from the Trump transition team was not immediately returned. A spokesperson for the Trump transition team told CNN's KFile Saturday when the initial report was published that they were standing by Crowley.

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/10/media/kfile-harper-collins-monica-crowley/index.html

---

Perhaps the sacrificial lamb among the Trump appointments?

[Generator]

1. She is such an awful hack too

And how fucking dare MSNBC and NBC "news" hire these Fox cretins? Another reason to get the fuck out of this country if you can. The worst of the worst-that is all Trump and the Republicons stand for.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Criticism toward the editor of the book for not finding a single instance of plagiarism out of 50.

[Glimmer of Hope]

3. 50 instances surely means she has a major character flaw.

She needs to withdraw her nomination.

[Erasto]

4. Imagine the Grief

Just imagine what would happen inf Obama was accused of this.

[QC]

5. If only there was some way publishers could prevent this kind of thing,

maybe some sort of editorial process or something like some kind of, you know, "fact-checking."

If only....

[Demit]

6. I don't think publishers do that. It's the author's responsibility.

I bet they'll think twice about publishing her again though. Hopefully her name will henceforth be mud in the publishing industry.

ETA: the LEGITIMATE publishing industry, that is. Regnery will no doubt welcome her into the fold.

[QC]

8. Fact-checking used to be the norm, but as the publishing industry

has cut staff in order to pump up profits, that kind of thing has fallen by the wayside. It's why you see so many typos in new books.

Cut cut cut cut. Money is all that matters.

[Demit]

9. Well, typos are a proofreader's job. They started cutting those when spellcheck came along.

But tell me, what book publisher ever used staff fact-checkers?

[QC]

10. Book publishers have always been slack in that regards. Magazines used to be strict--

I used to fact check for several national publications and had to go to insane lengths to check even small, insignificant stuff--and rightly so, as some of the other information I verified involved people's health and safety. We took pride in the rigor of our work. But now even magazines are cutting back on fact-checking. Gotta keep the stockholders happy.

When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I sweated every citation for fear that I might make a mistake that would sink my career before it began. Clearly, this idiot had no such concerns. I'm wondering whether her director was a careful as he should have been and whether Columbia will rescind her doctorate.

Interestingly, there is one publisher that's starting to fact-check. It's time, given the sloppiness this article points out: http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/will-book-publishers-ever-start-fact-checking.html?mid=twitter-share-vulture

[Demit]

11. It's what I love the New Yorker for, their utter fanaticism about fact-checking :)

I hope Columbia does, too. It's a real black eye for them. They've done it before, right? If only for all the candidates who really did put in the work. Otherwise it cheapens their effort. Thanks for the link, I'll look at that.

[Denzil_DC]

12. Well, I copy-edit books freelance for a living.

We're not briefed (let alone given the time) to fact-check as such, it's more about ensuring internal consistency, but if we spot something we believe to be suspect, we'll take it up with the author. On a few occasions with really severe problems, I've actually had to agree with the publisher that I rewrite to overcome demonstrable errors where the author hasn't been capable of doing so, but that's very rare indeed.

I've worked on one book in thirty or so years that I know for a fact was at least partly plagiarized. The author's first language wasn't English, and that aspect needed a whole lot of work (a lot of it read like it had been through Google Translate or whatever).

There were some statistical passages about a certain country where I couldn't make head nor tail of what the author was driving at, so I Googled some phrases including the numbers. Up came a Wikipedia article.

The author had evidently copied and and pasted from his own language's Wikipedia, then machine-translated the text into English. I drew this to the publisher's attention, but they weren't in a position to trash the book by that stage. So I had to be really careful in rephrasing "his" words to ensure that the result wasn't too glaringly close to the English-language Wikipedia articles!

I hated doing this, and I've no idea what other passages might have been lifted from other sources - I could only pick up on the ones that were so unclear I had to do online research about them.

The author was quite high up in the United Nations and had a bunch of academic qualifications from Western universities. Hmmm.

With Crowley's book drawing on multiple sources and presumably no prior cause for suspicion, it's hard to see how a copy-editor could have spotted what she was up to unless they happened to have read any of her source material and recognized the passages. I don't think they'd have employed an assessment reader before that stage with a relatively high-profile author, who might have picked it up if they spotted those passages.

She took a risk. It paid off. Then it didn't.

[randome]

7. There goes that Meredith McIver again! The scamp!

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Birds are territorial creatures.
The lyrics to the songbird's melodious trill go something like this:
"Stay out of my territory or I'll PECK YOUR GODDAMNED EYES OUT!"[/center][/font][hr]

[not fooled]

13. Hasn't someone designed software

that searches the web with excerpts or even the entire ms to check for matches? Don't teachers do this to find out if their students are turning in purchased papers?