by WorldTribune Staff, January 3, 2024
Following Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation on Tuesday amid an ongoing plagiarism scandal, The Associated Press claimed in a bylined “news” story: “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.”
In the AP’s telling of the story, the facts behind what spurred Gay’s resignation, dozens of reported instances of plagiarism in her work, including the verbatim lifting of entire paragraphs from the academic work of others, took a backseat to who initially brought the allegations.
The AP’s report states: “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.”
And while the conservative outlets focused on the plagiarism allegations, the AP injected race into its story.
The story states: “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.
“Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.”
David Mastio, former opinion editor at The Washington Times and USA Today, deconstructed the AP story in one paragraph in a LinkedIn post:
“This AP story is an amazing example of the problem with the monoculture of our media — frames plagiarism accusations as questionable, casts doubt on whether universities are liberal, blames whites for scalping, puts source of accusations above the facts behind them. Really amazing. Would never pass muster in heterodox newsroom.”
Related: Dr. Carol Swain has some ‘unsolicited advice’ for Harvard University, December 25, 2023
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