I've cheated so long I wonder how you keep track of me

No need for me to comment on this Gambit story about Jim Brown's plagiarism problem. Mark Moseley, who has made it a point to track Brown's activities over the years, adds his notes here.

Update: Ah but today's winning commentary comes from Slabbed (itself an occasional outlet for Brown's column) where we are reminded that Gambit isn't always the keenest arbiter of what constitutes plagiarism.

I will now lift the relevant comments in their entirety and reproduce them here.

I actually welcome the topic of plagiarism here on Slabbed and since I don’t have a “flea’s dick’s (sic) worth of talent” the dark arts of plagiarism evidently escapes me, but it has still appeared a time or two on these pages, especially in regards to one of Louisiana’s most famous plagiarist in the late Stephen Ambrose, for whom part of I-10 is named. The fact Ambrose was a shameless self promoter with limited academic talent was well-known inside the halls of UNO back in the 1980′s but the Gambit’s own Clancy Dubois (sic) evidently was not in on that bit of inside knowledge when he wrote this after Ambrose passed away:

Near the end of his life, Ambrose battled two demons: cancer and questions about the integrity of his scholarship. Critics claimed he had used the words of others without giving proper credit. In the end, the controversy amounted to little more than omitted quotation marks (footnotes gave proper credit in each case).

Really? It appears that Clancy missed the rest of that story big time, especially David Plotz’s piece in Slate which ran under the lede Why Stephen Ambrose is a Vampire well before Ambrose’s passing:

Ambrose ducked plagiarism No. 1, but then Forbes.com’s Mark Lewis started digging. On Monday, Lewis revealed that Ambrose lifted sentences from Jay Monaghan’s Custer biography in his 1975 book Crazy Horse and Custer.Two days later, Lewis exposed Cases 3 and 4—pilferage in 1997′s best seller Citizen Soldiers and 1991′s Nixon: Ruin and Recovery. And today the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick discovered five more swiped phrases and passages in The Wild Blue. Ambrose’s patriots can’t fall back on the factory defense anymore: Two of the cases occurred when Ambrose was an obscure professor, before he became Stephen Ambrose Industries. Ambrose is more defiant than apologetic.

Finally this Gambit piece is no doubt the reason that Jim contacted me late last week with news his column has gone on hiatus. As for me I’ll continue running Slabbed the same way as always because if the model isn’t broke it doesn’t need fixing. The power is in the ideas folks not the messenger. I am not condoning the past problems in Jim’s columns, but I do welcome the diversity of ideas Jim presented.

I think the bottom line here is in blogging like most everything else the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Jim Brown wrote his weekly column for shits and giggles. Ambrose built an entire career partly off other people’s non attributed work. For me it’s not even close but to each his own.

Of course the other part of what Ambrose built his career on was being an ass-kissing militaristic court historian which I'm guessing at least partially explains why so many of the other courtiers were so eager to overlook the fraudulent part. But I digress.

What I found even more intriguing were the various writers Gambit interviewed for the story who were oddly careful not to cast Brown's actions in too harsh a light.

But many of the writers themselves weren't so sure. Gambit contacted several journalists whose work was similar to (and predated) various passages in Brown's columns. Dalrymple, the Islam historian, wrote in an email, "Haha... The whole of literature is a game of Chinese whispers and we all borrow and learn from our peers. It's clear your friend has read my piece, but whether it's plagiarism or influence is not for me to judge."

  Alison Fitzgerald, a reporter for Bloomberg News whose February 2009 analysis of a Securities and Exchange Commission deal bore a resemblance to a Brown essay on the same topic published three months later, wrote to Gambit in an email: "While there are certainly similarities here, I'm not equipped to determine whether this is plagiarism," adding she intended to forward the example to Bloomberg's in-house attorney for review.

  In March 2008, Brown wrote a column on highway privatization, portions of which bore a strong resemblance to a 2007 Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Steven Malanga. (See "You Be the Judge.") Malanga told Gambit, "His passage does seem awfully close to mine in that both the ideas proceed together in the same way sentence by sentence and some of the language is exactly the same as mine. I was not aware of this." Malanga concluded, "I leave it up to editors who publish his work to decide if they consider this improper."

Sounds a lot like "There but by the grace of God" from these professional writers. And I guess that's understandable. On the other hand, Brown seems like a pretty straightforward case to me.