much to our amazement, cleveland plain dealer reporter steven koff responded to our
email taking him to task for
accusing sherrod brown of plagiarizing
nathan newman's words. mr. koff wrote (en toto; in other words, no salutation, or signature line...and people call
us lazy for not using capitals!):
sherrrod brown's office got the content from nathan newman, not from dailykos. it doesn't matter what dailykos says at the bottom of the page; newman's post at dailykos had nothing to do with sherrod brown's receipt of the newman's content.
the rest of mr. koff's response, and our response to his response, after the jump:
mr. koff continues:
consent does not matter (and despite what nathan newman posted yesterday, i tried to reach him on monday by e-mail and phone; his posting is simply wrong). sherrod brown "wrote" and signed a lengthy and pointed letter to mike dewine, but the fact of the matter is, nathan newman actually wrote almost all of it. it's wonderful that newman is fine with that, but he was not elected to represent the 13th congressional district of ohio. if the congressman and the blogger are interchangeable, the public deserves to know. if the congressman puts his name to a document prepared, in fact, by a blogger, the public deserves to know. this was not just a matter of talking points; this was a matter of an elected official parroting, word for word, almost everything.
the content of the letter will in fact be addressed. but there are about 60 days until the hearings, ample time to get into that.
the fact of the matter is that brown is gunning for dewine's seat. that's perfectly fine and fair. but brown's letter was as much a political missive -- penned by a blogger -- as a request for a thorough inquiry into alito's worker rights record. for some reason, bloggers -- in a frenzy to attack anyone they perceive in disagreement -- refuse to recognize that.
it is stunning and disappointing that partisans in the blogosphere, and their rabid audience, are so quick to pounce on a journalist whose work they clearly don't know. ask sherrod brown some time about my probe into the duping of a gop congressman whose vote was crucial on cafta, about my investigation of the use of leadership pacs as lifestyle slush funds, about the gop congressman from ohio who seems to be beholden to the for-profit education lobby, about tim timken's company's receipt (unknown to most) of generous defense contracts. these were roughly within the last year. i don't remember a single blogger criticizing those. funny thing.
we returned a letter to him (copied to nathan, and to the editors at the cleveland plain dealer:
mr. koff,
first of all, all snark and disagreement aside, we must thank you for taking time to respond to our letter. you get points for addressing our query on an individual basis.
as to your assertion that brown got the content of the letter from nathan newman's blog, and not the exact same posting on daily kos, we must ask you to provide proof of that, or at least explain how you know this to be so. we assume you were not in brown's office when the letter was written, so we are curious how you can state with confidence which web site brown's office got it from for a fact.
and, since nathan gave his implicit consent, even if it was in hindsight, we still maintain that it is not plagiarism...extreme laziness, to be sure. but to your point that "the congressman and blogger are interchangeable" because one of brown's staffers didn't bother to rewrite what was basically a litany of unarguable facts (and that nathan wasn't "elected to represent the 13th congressional district in ohio"), we would submit that you are over-simplifying and using hyperbole to justify your (non) actions. the use of another person's words (or list of facts, which is more what nathan's post was) does not negate the user's life long aggregation of convictions, beliefs, and commitments. in other words, similarity (or, as you would have it, plagiarism) is not identity. we paraphrase the words of great thinkers all the time; alas, that does not make us one.
you say the content of the letter will be addressed, but there are "about 60 days until the hearings, ample time to get to that." which begs the questions, what deadline about copying other people's blogs is approaching, and how did we not hear about it? let's be frank, for you to write about what amounts to be laziness on the part a brown staffer, and then dismiss the urgency of the facts used (facts that were not in question, at least not by you) reveals what priorities you place on the entire democratic process, in our humble opinion.
you bemoan the lack of blogger's attention to the substantive investigative work you've done in the past, and the "rabid" blogger audience "so quick to pounce" on you when you write about this fabricated brou-ha-ha. with all due respect, may we suggest that if you had been a bit more substantive and investigative in this instance, instead of taking the superficial "entertainment tonight" teacher-he's-copying-my-homework approach, the bloggers might not have pounced on you so quickly.
you say the letter was a political missive...perhaps, we haven't seen the actual letter brown's office sent. we certainly don't see the political missive in nathan's post, other than a recounting of specific decisions made by a nominee for the supreme court. the listing of facts isn't really a political missive. if the anti-labor shoe fits, alito will have to wear it.
we wish you luck in your further endeavors, and take you at your word that you have done solid investigative work in the past. we sincerely hope you return to that school of journalism in the future.
again, we thank you for your time to respond to our letter.
sincerely,
etc.
as of now, nathan says the plain dealer is set to publish his own letter to the editor tomorrow, and the asspress has written a fairly "decent" piece on the whole affair; also, nathan says the plain dealer has written a new article to more directly address the issue of alito's anti-labor stand.
addendum: now the plain dealer has re-re-stated their stand, calling nathan an "internet dilettante," because apparently he won't co-operate with their portrait of him as victim in this terrible, terrible scandal.