The Associated Press was forced to make an embarrassing admission following an article published about disgraced Harvard President Claudine Gay.
This week, AP moved to edit a controversial headline, stating that it did not meet their journalistic standards.
The original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” was met with an abundance of criticism, forcing the Left-wing outlet to revise it.
After critics accused the outlet of defending plagiarism, saying it is a Republican tactic used against academic institutions, AP changed the headline to: “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.”
“The story doesn’t meet our standards,” Vice President of the Associated Press Lauren Easton said.
Gay has been accused of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles, which a Harvard committee lightly confirmed. It found several examples of “duplicative language” in Gay’s work.
Gay eventually resigned from her position at Harvard amid growing backlash. However, the woke Ivy League school refused to classify Gay’s plagiarized work as reckless.
Despite editing its headline, the Associated Press still managed to portray conservatives in a bad light.
The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny…
Conservatives zeroed in on Gay amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman…
The allegations against Gay initially came from conservative activists, some who stayed anonymous. They looked for the kinds of duplicated sentences undergraduate students are trained to avoid, even with citation.
In dozens of instances first published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works. A review ordered by Harvard acknowledged she duplicated the language without using quotation marks.
Harvard previously said Gay updated her dissertation and requested corrections from journals.
Among her critics in conservative circles and academia, the findings are clear evidence that Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it isn’t so clear-cut.