MSNBC’s far left talking head Mehdi Hasan has been credibly accused of plagiarism.
The last time we heard from Hasan, he was questioning the authenticity of the Twitter Files.
This is the sort of thing that journalists typically get fired over.
The Spectator reports:
Mehdi Hasan exposed as copycat and hypocrite
Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC has a plagiarism problem. It appears that, as with the cases of John Oliver and James Corden, Britain is not sending its best. The pundit also seems to be as much of a chameleon as Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, taking whatever position gets him ahead.
Lee Fang, a reporter formerly at the Intercept, published an investigative piece on his Substack looking at Hasan’s journalistic (or, maybe, not-so-journalistic) history. “Writing” an article in 2000 taking up the cause of spanking disobedient kids, he took — almost to the letter — the text from a 1998 article in US News and World Report. A few alterations here and there to account for the difference in date, and voila!
Hasan pulled a similar stunt later that year when he copied and pasted (or its 2000 equivalent) the text from a piece about the Israel-Palestine conflict without proper attribution.
More from Lee Fang on Substack:
Before he was shouting down opponents with ad hominem slurs, Hasan was passing off others’ reporting as his own, sometimes without any citation at all. In one of his first attempts at journalism, Hasan authored a column in defense of spanking children, “No Harm In Smacking,” in January 2000, that is nearly a word-for-word duplication of the article, “When to Spank,” published two years earlier in U.S. News and World Report.
The similarities are apparent from the beginning of Hasan’s piece. “Anti-smacking crusaders have consistently relied upon inconclusive studies to make sweeping over-generalisations about the dangers of smacking,” he began his piece for The Independent, a London-based newspaper.
It’s virtually identical to a line used by co-authors Lynn Rosellini and Anna Mulrine in their news article on the topic for U.S. News and World Report. “Antispanking crusaders relied on inconclusive studies to make sweeping overgeneralizations about spanking’s dangers,” Mulrine and Rossellini wrote.
The Hasan piece, titled “No Harm In Smacking,” goes on to copy every single line from the U.S. News and World Report article, save for occasionally swapping out or adding a few words in each sentence.
Is anyone surprised by this?
Lee Fang (@lhfang) does an excellent job documenting @mehdirhasan’s lengthy career of shady journalism in service of the elite https://t.co/w272v26EE6
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 18, 2023
MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan accused of plagiarizing pro-child-spanking column https://t.co/BIi4V6UHQr pic.twitter.com/wYbcPTjpho
— New York Post (@nypost) April 19, 2023
Mehdi Hasan doesn’t just smear other journalists with lies and false accusations of bigotry to get ahead, he also has a history of stealing from them. https://t.co/qyG5wiWnU7
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) April 18, 2023
Good for Lee Fang for exposing this.
