General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Chris Hedges: The Ghoulish Face of Empire [View all]merrily
(45,251 posts)I am wondering what motive the fact checker would have had to be so open about internal business with an outsider? If I told stuff like that, I'd be afraid of being fired.
What is lost in all this, as well as just how good a person and a writer Hedges's is, is that the piece that Harper supposedly killed was an investigative report on poverty in Camden, NJ.
What bothered me was the possibility that Hedges may have lied to the fact checker about Katz.
If the piece is true, this may indicate something wrong with Hedges-- inability to meet deadlines for some reason, maybe. You never know what is going on in someone's body or someone's life.
Jane Hamsher noted that the original article contained almost no evidence of plagiarism. The Times saw no reason to dig up his old pieces and ....
From the original (smear?) piece:
In an aside near the end of his piece, Ketcham also includes this cautionary paragraph:
I reached out both to Chris Hedges and to the Nation Institutes executive director, Taya Kitman, with a summary of the instances of plagiarism uncovered in the course of this investigation. In an e-mail, Kitman told me that, upon becoming aware of this story some months ago when in December of 2012 I apprised the Nation Institute of the article in progress both the Nation Institute and Nation Books conducted a review of Hedgess writing in his capacity as a Nation Books author and as an investigative fund reporter. Kitman wrote that this internal investigation did not find any instances of plagiarism. Chris has been one of our most valuable and tireless public intellectuals, she said in her e-mailed statement.