At the end of last week, it emerged that Timothy S. Goeglein, who until his resignation on Friday was the White House aide responsible for working with conservative and Christian groups, had plagiarized in one of his regular guest columns published in the News-Sentinel. Former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall* revealed the plagiarism. From there, it only got worse. In the end, an investigation by the paper revealed Goeglein was a serial plagiarist. The paper discovered 20 instances of theft, and subsequently tacked on seven more. A full package of articles is online here. From the paper:
Contacted Sunday, the Fort Wayne native attributed the plagiarism to shortcomings in his character: “Pride. Vanity. It’s all my fault. It’s inexcusable. What I did is wrong. I categorically apologize.”
Until Friday, Goeglein was special assistant to President Bush and public liaison deputy director. Early Friday morning, Michigan blogger and former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall posted excerpts of a Thursday guest column by Goeglein and nearly identical paragraphs from a 10-year-old essay in the Dartmouth Review by Jeffrey Hart. Less than 12 hours later, after The News-Sentinel found plagiarism in 20 of 38 columns dating to 2000, Goeglein resigned.
An examination of 39 more guest columns from Goeglein published during the 1990s turned up seven that pulled material from earlier-published sources without attribution, including another from Hart.
Evidence of plagiarism appears as early as 1995. During 1998 and 1999, six of 15 guest columns written by Goeglein were plagiarized. In 1998, he was press secretary for former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats. In 1999, he was communications director for The Campaign for Working Families in Washington, D.C.
Goeglein’s guest columns were unsolicited submissions to the editorial page. He was not paid, and there were no deadlines for their completion, News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt said. Hubartt announced Friday the newspaper will no longer publish columns from Goeglein.
In multiple e-mails to The New-Sentinel on Friday, Goeglein, 44, apologized for his actions. “I am more apologetic than you know, and from my heart. Please know how deeply sorry I am,” he wrote to Editorial Page Editor Leo Morris.
On Sunday, Goeglein said, “I have no plans at this point.” His responsibilities in the president’s administration ended Friday with his resignation, he said.
Romenesko has been tracking this (1,2,3,4,5,6) and AP also has a story up. Of particular interest is a fascinating article Nall wrote for Slate. She recounts how she uncovered the plagiarism, and details how bloggers and commenters moved the story forward at a rapid pace:
Saying the news cycle moves at an ever-increasing pace doesn’t even qualify as a cliché anymore. But this felt like a new record. Reporting in one minute, writing in one hour, a whole career undone in one day. Reading the comments piling up on the original post was a surreal experience, as one reader after another checked in with evidence, with links. It was journalism as hive mind. “Everyone wants to play now,” someone wrote after posting a link.
People, including myself, often point to “Rathergate” as a case study in networked fact checking. In my book, I dedicate a chapter section to the “new checkers,” the cadre of engaged citizens who mobilize to act as external fact checkers. The Goeglein story is the latest example of this phenomenon. From Nall:
I spent much of the weekend thinking about all this. My ex-colleague Leo Morris, who edits the op-ed pages Tim used as his canvas for all those years, did as well and wrote on his blog: “This wasn’t mere hardware-pushed speed—a breaking news story for which people all around the world could see a grainy cell-phone photo five minutes after it happened. This was the online dynamic—people talking about the story and adding to it as it got bigger and more complex throughout the day.”
The story was new media, but, ironically, at its core was a very old-media concern—getting the little things right. Friday night, I got an e-mail from a fan of that notable Dartmouth professor of philosophy whose name started this whole thing. And guess what? Jeffrey Hart misspelled his name. It’s Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, not Eugene, not Hussey. When I entered the misspelled name into Google, it only turned up a couple pages of hits, and Hart’s essay was on the first page, so I spotted it right away. But if Hart had spelled the name correctly and Goeglein had pasted it as such in his own column, Hart’s decade-old Dartmouth Review essay, which mentioned the professor only in passing, would probably have been far back in the queue in the 20,000 Google hits his real name gets. And I probably would not have seen it—after all, I was just trying to find out how “notable” he was.
Remarkable. Goeglein was busted thanks to a plagiarized typo.
*Correction March 4: This post mistakenly referred to Nancy Nall as “Nancy Nail.” It has been corrected. Thanks, Kevin!
