The Anti-Trump Media’s Attack on Monica Crowley
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
My friend Monica Crowley was the subject of a major hit job by CNN a few weeks back. She is a serious scholar,
but she was portrayed as a serial plagiarist who never had an original idea in her head.
The emotional toll of the uproar caused her to withdraw from her appointment by President Trump to be the senior director of communications at the National Security Council.
It is the country’s loss. Over the last two decades, Monica has been one of the most effective commentators on the national scene regarding the geopolitical challenges confronting the United States, and in particular the phenomenon of jihadist terror catalyzed by sharia-supremacist ideology — radical Islam. As much as anyone I’ve encountered, she has been invaluable: communicating the threats, debating them, and defending sensible national-security measures. All writers make mistakes.
But Monica’s have been blown wildly out of proportion, to the point of smear.....
As Ms. Chu concluded:
I found CNN’s splashy “plagiarism” accusation to be ill-supported — a heavily exaggerated, political hit job.
Instead,
after reading texts side by side with footnotes, I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall. Many parallels in fact read on the page as rather different even if certain content or phrases were the same, and they were largely short, fragmentary, and routine.
Historical research inevitably draws heavily on the work of other scholars. Dissertations exist to synthesize. T
he relatively few examples of unsourced copying found was in my opinion de minimus, should just be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.
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According to Ms. Chu, CNN itemized 37 passages out of the 461 dissertation pages as improperly mined from the work of others without sourcing
; but 26 of these items were “straightforwardly false” because, in order to make Monica look like a plagiarist, CNN omitted her footnotes. As Chu writes:
Ms. Crowley’s paraphrases were correctly sourced in her footnotes. But in most of these 26,
CNN had omitted her footnote references. CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/44 ... ca-crowley