Here's a repeat of a Dump Bachmann post from Halloween, 2011:
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Steve Buttry a 40-year veteran in the news biz has this to say on his blog about plagiarism:
Attribution is the difference between research and plagiarism. Given the scandals in journalism over the past decade, the typical excuse blaming plagiarism on sloppiness simply doesn’t wash. Plagiarism can ruin a career.You'd think jet-setting, East Coast reporters would have learned a lesson about plundering homegrown media in flyover country for content after Matt Taibbi got caught ripping off G.R. Anderson's City Pages profiles of Michele Bachmann.
Now, The New Republic's Mariah Blake thinks she can Google-up a whole bunch of articles by local reporters and cobble together a flawed, confusing, unfocused article. No wonder Scott Lemieux conflates Petters and Vennes at the Lawyers Guns & Money blog:
Mariah Blake’s article about Tom Petters is fascinating stuff. Petters used a Ponzi scheme funded largely by hedge funds, investors known to Petters and his associates through Christian groups, and the purchase of failing legitimate businesses to finance the classic lifestyle of the conservative wealthy-and-tasteless (high stakes slot machines! Yacht cruises with prostitutes, interns selected as potential sex partners, and cocktails involving Red Bull and citrus vodka!) All throughout this, he sought to get a pardon for his past crimes with the help of political backers ranging from Fritz Mondale to Michele Bachmann.
Longtime readers of this blog know that Bachmann wrote a letter supporting a pardon for Vennes, not Petters.
The TNR cover claims the article tells the "untold story" of the Tom Petters Ponzi scheme - what horse crap!. That story was told by every major news outlet in the state, the news wires and national business news outlets. I covered the trial of Tom Petters for the City Pages and kept a blog titled Petters Info. I even won an SPJ award for my nightly video reports of the trial (sadly, swept away by Bradlee Dean's You Tube take-down with only one remaining). Beth Hawkins wrote a long article for Minnesota Monthly in 2009 titled "Trust Me" and covered the trial for Bloomberg. There were many articles about Petters in the Strib, PiPress and on radio and TV. The trial and conviction of Tom Petters was one of the top Minnesota news stories of 2009 and the last decade. Untold? Really?
Less covered, but covered nonetheless is the saga of Michele Bachmann's top donor of 2006 and convicted felon Frank Vennes. The first article mentioning Frank Vennes appeared in the Star Tribune written by Jon Tevlin. Compare these two passages, one from Tevlin's article and the other from TNR:
The ending of Jon Tevlin's October 4, 2008 Strib story on Vennes:
"From a basement vault, agents took boxes and buckets of silver and gold coins, trays of jewelry, five stacks of $100 bills, boxes of gem stones, silver plates and Rolex watches. Agents also seized diamond rings and numerous paintings, including dozens with religious themes, such as the raising of Lazarus from the dead."
The ending of the TNR article:
"When FBI agents raided his home back in 2008, they cracked open a basement vault. Amid the buckets of gold coins and stacks of hundred dollar bills, they found a trove of religious paintings, including one of Lazarus rising from the dead."
Geez, ending an article with the image of Lazarus rising from the dead - that deserves an encore. Shameless!
Shortly after the 2008 FBI raid that discovered Frank's treasure trove, investigative reporter Karl Bremer wrote one article after another on Frank Vennes. Karl's excellent muckraking articles appeared on Minnesota Independent, Dump Bachmann and the Ripple in Stillwater blog. I've added additional information about Frank Vennes here and at my Vennes Info blog. I have the only courtroom sketches of Frank Vennes and his cohorts.
Appropriating the research of Minnesota reporters, Mariah Blake makes mistakes as well. Blake and TNR describe the Petters Ponzi scheme as a "$36 Billion Ponzi swindle". $36 billion is the amount that passed through Petters, but the total amount actually lost is now described as $3.8 billion.
For comparison, there's a Think Progress article today using the much smaller $17 billion figure for Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
There is a big chapter in our book The Madness of Michele Bachmann about Frank Vennes, so don't bother reading The New Republic's boring, error-riddled article. Our book's official publication date is December 12th.
As Steve Buttry says on his blog:
Perhaps you got away with plagiarism or fabrication in college. Perhaps you got caught plagiarizing for a term paper and the university’s punishment wasn’t too bad. If that’s the case, you need to change your thinking if you want to succeed in the news business. Newspapers can use plagiarism-detection software to screen reporters’ stories before they run. The Internet gives readers and interest groups powerful tools that will help them detect or even accidentally stumble across your cheating. A reader who has set up a Google news alert in an area that interests her could receive e-mail messages calling attention to your story and the story you stole from. If that reader e-mails those stories to your editor, your career will be over before the day ends and you’ll be an item in Romenesko or Regret the Error..
For reporters like Mariah Blake and Matt Taibbi, Steve Buttry has another blog post with a lesson on how to use other writers' work while giving them the attribution they deserve.
POSTSCRIPT: TNR left their fingerprints at the scene of the crime... They stole a photo without credit that appears on Karl Bremer's Ripple in Stillwater blog and nowhere else. I was at the courthouse when Karl took that photo. It captures Vennes in full flight from reporters with Karl in pursuit. Karl ran after Vennes for several blocks snapping pictures of the fleeing felon. That's the sort of effort real reporters put into getting a story.
Karl sued and settled with the New Republic for an undisclosed sum.
