Claudine Gay caught with more 'duplicative' language and the New York Times thinks the problem is the right-wing press

Does the New York Times have any regard for truth at all?

They seem to have been forced to report that Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, has been caught yet again in another string of plagiarisms and they say the problem is the right-wing press.

Get a load of how they led their piece:

Harvard University, in the face of mounting questions over possible plagiarism in the scholarly work of its president, Claudine Gay, said on Wednesday that it had found two additional instances of insufficient citation in her work.

The issues were found in Dr. Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

Last week, Harvard said that an earlier review had found two published articles that needed additional citations, and that Dr. Gay would request corrections.

“President Gay will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation,” the university said on Wednesday of the additional findings.

...and why it wasn't an academic disaster or anything, just "an embarrassing development":

The allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay have been driven by conservative media, and on Dec. 10 surfaced publicly when the activist Christopher Rufo published a newsletter piece headlined, “Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?” That article, which highlighted issues with Dr. Gay’s dissertation, appeared the night before the board met to decide if she would remain as Harvard’s president.

Additional allegations continued to surface in conservative outlets like The Washington Free Beacon and on social media, even after the board announced on Dec. 12 that it would stand behind her.

And just in case that isn't clear enough, the Times quoted this guy to say the quiet part out loud:

For some faculty members, and not just liberal ones, the details of the charges and Harvard’s procedures were less important than the context in which the charges were being lobbed. [Yes, they wrote that. -ed.]

"It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”

“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people."

So it doesn't matter whether the charge is true or not; to this guy and his institution, the messenger is more important. And since he doesn't like the messenger, the meaning of the message actually changes. Objective truth and hard facts are for rightwingers, see. Heck, cool detachment is for rightwingers. Fried's truth, his truth, "depends on context."

You sure as heck wouldn't want to see a guy like that with a gavel.

Gay herself revealed that this was her way of thinking, too. In her apology for her inability to condemn genocide against Jews before Congress, she explained that she had gotten "caught up in the moment" with her congressional questioner, Rep. Elise Stefanik, the logic being that if rightwing Elise says it, it has to be contradicted as wrong. That's why she brought up all that "context" which made her look like such an antisemitic creep.

The Times took pains to identify Fried as a conservative as if to prove that their partisan take on this plagiarism matter was actually bipartisan, but that's pretty skeevy. The Reagan administration that they identify Fried with was a long, long time ago, and this guy has far more years spent at Harvard not getting fired. Might this guy have changed his politics to fit in with the Harvard faculty lounge like a lot of them have done? Might he be a neverTrump or now on the left? I'd like to see his current voter registration. His Wikipedia page says he voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in recent elections.

He's not exactly a conservative by normal standards but he is to serve the Times' purposes.

Which brings us back to the orginal problem, that they think this story, an objective one if there ever was one, is the work of rightwing ... shall we add it? ... conspiracy theorists.

Rather than being embarrassed by getting scooped by the dread right wing press, they use this occasion to try to discredit the right wing press, even as the uncomfortable facts of plagiarism remain there to do second-day reporting on.

The shocking thing here is that the Times doesn't seem to think there's much more than just uneasiness about Gay getting caught in yet another string of plagiarisms and the matter carrying on without consequences. Getting caught, as the Times put it is just embarrassing -- like having toilet paper at stuck to your shoe or a stain on your pants.

In reality, it's a blow to university's actual prestige and credibility.

Already we have seen that the university has seen a major drop in early enrollment based on Gay's leadership. We have seen that antisemitism under Gay has cost the university one billion dollars in donations.

It won't be long before the school starts dropping in the rankings as news of this relativist academic standard drops its academic bar lower.

Now we see how the establishment coddles and covers up for her, despite her years of copying others' work which she passed off her own.

Didn't Stanford fire its president for academic turpitude? Didn't Columbia Ph.D. Monica Crowley get denied a Trump administration job at Treasury based on evidence of plagiarism amid huffs and harrumphs?

Somehow, Gay keeps skating and nothing is ever done. For her, they've even come up with some Newspeak in a bid to cover for her -- just a matter of 'duplicative language.'

The bottom line here is that if a rightwinger makes the accusation, the accusation is automatically invalid -- not because it doesn't stand up, not because it's not the truth, but because a rightwinger says it.  

This is two-tier standards taken to yet another low.

Any questions as to why voters are lining up for President Trump? 

Once upon a time they would say: Want More Trump? That's how you get More Trump. Now Harvard is Exhibit A for these double standards that put truth secondary to favored and disfavored messenger identities.

Image: Screen shot from WION video, via YouTube

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