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CNN May Have Confirmed Reports of Harris' Plagiarism, but Did You See How the NYT Framed the Story?

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  October 16, 2024 6:00 PM

Vice President Kamala Harris has found herself in a world of trouble with the election now less than three weeks away. It's possible, but it's also not likely that her campaign can correct course between now and then. Former and potentially future President Donald Trump has also been running a particularly disciplined campaign. Even as the Harris-Walz campaign may appear to be on a course correction, such as with the media blitz, it looks like it just keeps backfiring. Further, Harris' past issues have come back to haunt her.

As Katie covered on Monday, Christopher Rufo provided plenty of evidence that Harris had plagiarized her 2009 book, "Smart on Crime," co-authored by Joan O’C. Hamilton. The title alone ought to make readers skeptical, given how the policies Harris has pursued on crime have been anything but that.

Rufo came armed to the teeth with receipts that he shared in a thread over X. Rufo had confirmed an investigation done by Dr. Stefan Weber, described as "a famed Austrian 'plagiarism hunter' who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world."

Not only are there examples from media outlets, such as the Associated Press, as well as colleges such as the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but also Wikipedia. 

Rufo has since highlighted more examples of plagiarism, including from the California government website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The mainstream media reaction has ended up mixed. On Monday night, CNN confirmed Rufo's reporting. While the headline and opening focuses on Rufo's role as a "conservative activist," they did acknowledge his findings:


CNN reviewed several of the passages highlighted by Rufo and found that Harris and O’C. Hamilton failed to properly attribute language to sources.

Plagiarized works include using someone else’s work without giving them proper and appropriate credit for their ideas and words. Even if the source of the information is cited, it is still considered plagiarism if the ideas are not paraphrased or quoted in the correct place, experts told CNN late last year.

Rufo shared such an excerpt, as well as concerns about CNN's framing. 

It gets even worse from there, though, including and especially when it comes to The New York Times. 

That outlet was fine getting on board with framing Rufo as a "conservative activist," though they also emphasized how he "seized" on Harris' plagiarism. "Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book," their headline, also from Monday read. Their subheadline even references a "plagiarism expert," who claims that the violations were "not serious."

While the article tried to downplay the violations, they still admit to an issue here:

In a review of the book, The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.

The five passages that Mr. Rufo cited appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.

Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.

“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.”

Going with that "seizes" narrative, the write-up also tries to go after Rufo for his opposition to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, and for how he's dared to take down other plagiarists:

Known for his work opposing diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Mr. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, published plagiarism accusations last year that helped lead to the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.

Mr. Rufo is part of a loose confederation of conservative writers and activists who, during the past year, have tried to expose plagiarism among academics, many of whom have been Black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion.

That these plagiarists are black isn't what's at issue, but rather that they lie, cheat, and try to get away with it and use such bad habits to get ahead. Further, former Harvard President Claudine Gay still teaches graduate courses. 

The story gets even richer from there. The expert in question, Jonathan Bailey, came out with a post of his own over X to say he didn't even get to see the book, but merely looked over excerpts provided to him by The New York Times.

The Harris' team's desperate tactics come into play here as well. Rufo, as justmindy at our sister site of Twitchy covered, also shared that the publisher accidentally revealed all concerns about Harris' plagiarism have to go through higher ups. 

Chronicle Books, Rufo posted, sure does look to indeed be "in damage control mode."

The Washington Post's coverage of Harris' plagiarism scandal didn't go with the conservative activist "seizes" angle, though it did cover it from a perspective of the campaign's denial. "Harris campaign rejects claims of plagiarism," read the headline, with the subheadline claiming that "Some experts say the incidents cited by a conservative critic are modest and may not reflect an intentional effort to take credit."

Such an outlet went with a similar line of attack against Rufo as The New York Times did:

Rufo, a prominent right-leaning activist, played a central role in the push by conservatives to highlight critical race theory as emblematic of what he sees as the problems with progressives’ approach to education and race. CRT argues that racism in the United States is systemic and not just rooted in individual bigotry — an idea that some find self-evident and others deeply objectionable.

In part because of such arguments, Rufo has become an in-demand activist who has advised numerous Republican and conservative candidates, from school boards to state legislatures to Congress.

He also played a role in pressing Harvard University to oust its former president, Claudine Gay, with accusations that, as a doctoral candidate in the 1990s, she had plagiarized sections of her dissertation. “While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning,” Rufo wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed after Gay stepped down.

So, what was that campaign's response? It's actually quite laughable, and again, desperate:

“Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies,” campaign spokesman James Singer said in a statement. “This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.”

...

“Smart on Crime” was published in 2009 at a time when Harris’s career was taking off as she rose from district attorney of San Francisco to attorney general of California. The book features Harris on the cover, but it also lists Hamilton, a California-based writing collaborator and content consultant, as a co-author. Hamilton declined to comment and referred questions to the Harris campaign.

The Washington Post even thought it necessary to go after Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) for his memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," because he dared to crack a joke about the plagiarism scandal and how Harris and her co-author took from Wikipedia. Vance also tellingly predicted the media would come after him.

It wasn't just Vance, but The Washington Post went after Melania Trump as well, for her 2016 RNC speech.