Becket Adams writes for National Review Online about legacy media outlets’ apparent disinterest in a major controversy involving the nation’s oldest university.
The stuff the corporate press chooses to pump out now, and the editorial choices they make regarding what is pursued and what is not pursued, has all the feel of public-relations work tailored specifically to excite and inspire a specific fan base of left-wingers.
Take, for example, the national news coverage of Harvard University’s great shame, President Claudine Gay.
Gay beclowned herself before Congress recently when she equivocated over the simple question of whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct.”
“It depends on the context,” Gay hemmed with a side of haw.
Her mealy-mouthed response was so poorly received that calls for her resignation inevitably followed. The embarrassment deepened as the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet uncovered examples of plagiarism in Gay’s doctoral dissertation. The Washington Free Beacon then outed Gay as a serial plagiarist, a revelation not given its due attention by legacy-media outlets.
“Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work,” the Free Beacon reported, having asked several scholars to review her small output of papers.
The Free Beacon report stated that, “in four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors — including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government — without proper attribution.”
“The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism,” the report explained. “Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that ‘it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.’”
