The article makes a case that I found compelling. It has several examples, with side-by-side comparisons, of how Hedges' text is basically a word-for-word transposition of other people's writings, often with minor paraphrases/wording changes to obscure that. And when called on to respond, Hedges shows very little regard for the seriousness of those claims.
See, for instance, the response to not citing Hemingway for the changed version of a passage he had initially written that uncannily resembled a passage in
A Farewell to Arms:
In response, Hedges told me that the passage “was noticed and corrected by me after the first edition was published. This was several months before the e-mail from Palaima.” And: “The passage, when it was corrected, was sufficiently different from the Hemingway not to warrant attribution.”
The fact that it had to be "noticed and corrected" is an admission on Hedges' part that he
did, even if unintentionally, lift Hemingway's words. Consequently, changing it to be an even more distant paraphrase of Hemingway's statement doesn't change the fact that he does seem to have initially gotten the idea from Hemingway; it isn't a valid excuse for not citing.
There are multiple clear-cut examples of him copying Petra Bartosiewicz's language in a
Harpers article. Hedges claimed that it was just sloppy attribution meant to be a block quote rather than his own words. But that is contradicted by how, in one lifted passage, he changed "my local reporter" to "a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz":
Bartosiewicz:
The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate.
Hedges:
The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate.
Thus indicating it was not meant as a block quote, but rather as text to include in the main article as if he wrote it. So Hedges also appears to have been lying in order to minimize the severity of what he was doing.
In response to another lifted passage, where Hedges very evidently (as can be seen in a side-by-side comparison) lifted Neil Postman's passage juxtaposing Orwell and Huxley's visions of dystopia, Hedges said:
When I asked Hedges about the similarities between his work and Postman’s, he wrote, “Please see the file that is posted in the archive on the Truthdig web site. It credits Postman for the juxdaposition [sic] of Orwell and Huxley.” He did not respond to questions about the discrepancy with the Common Dreams version of the piece and the original piece as it was published at Truthdig.
Acknowledging that the idea was Postman's, not his...which in turn amounts to a tacit admission that he had plagiarized it from Postman because initial versions of his published article (archived on the Wayback Machine, which the article I shared links to) did not attribute those words to Postman.
Do I think that this invalidates the good work Hedges has done overall? Of course not. I have often consumed and enjoyed his work, both his writings and his voice and video appearances. Nor do I doubt that there was, at some level, an agenda in going after an anti-establishment left-wing figure like Hedges in particular.
But that doesn't make the content of the article false. There is still no excuse for Hedges' pattern of lifting other people's words, appearing to have no regard for how serious it is to do so, and even lying about it. It unnecessarily discredits his work on very important issues. And his practice of doing so only adds to
the suspicions I've outlined previously about how honest of a dissident voice Hedges has really been.
