News/Commentary

AP gets thumped by Community Notes for calling plagiarism ‘new conservative weapon’

January 3, 2024 | | Print Article

Ripe for the ratio, the Associated Press got called out by Community Notes and X users for their “conservative weapon” take on plagiarism.

“You’ve all lost your f*cking minds.”

Soaking up the small victories, conservatives celebrated Tuesday when news broke that Harvard University president Claudine Gay had announced her resignation. Seen by many as overdue after her congressional testimony regarding campus antisemitism and subsequent revelations about plagiarism, the AP had a wholly different take that leaned wholly into the “Republicans pounce” narrative.

“Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” came the headline of the article that went on to state, “The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.”

Anyone familiar with the AP Style Guide’s frequent woke updates, satisfying society’s ever-shifting Overton Window toward leftism, would find little surprise in the news organization running such a piece.

That fact didn’t detract from the devastating Community Notes context slapped onto the post that read, “Plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University…Claudine Gay was ultimately forced to resign for a series of breaches of this policy…Plagiarism — or application of the rules around plagiarism — therefore cannot be considered a ‘weapon’.”

Image via X

Within the piece, the AP endeavored to massage the academic wrongdoing from Gay by referring to her instances of plagiarism as “long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works” and stating how Harvard itself had dubbed the passages “duplicative language.”

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In citing defenders of the resigned president, the AP even suggested the likelihood that such a practice was rampant in the continually-devolving halls of higher education that have put agenda ahead of academics.

Referencing Trinity College historian Davarian Baldwin, the article stated, “Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.”

Further, defending plagiarism, of which their own handbook states “We do not plagiarize, meaning that we do not take the work of others and pass it off as our own,” was not the only angle capitalized on in the piece as racism was also raised as a serious concern.

End Wokeness pointed out on X, “AP says that scalping came from whites and claims plagiarism is a right-wing weapon. All in a single article. The media is beyond parody.”

The social media account shared a screengrab from the piece that read, “Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.”

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Likening the arguments to a villain unmasked by the Scooby gang, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R) communications director Abigail Jackson mocked, “‘And we would’ve gotten away with it too! If it hadn’t been for those darned conservatives and their… *checks notes* pointing out that our top academic university president plagiarized’…Yes [because] it’s totally the conservatives fault.”

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Kevin Haggerty
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