The Star Tribune on steroids
John Podesta is the long-time Democratic staffer whose political career culminated in his service as Bill Clinton's chief of staff from October 1998 until the time Clinton exited office in January 2001. Podesta frankly proclaims that he was a fierce defender of the Clinton administration.
Podesta currently serves as the president and chief executive officer of the Center for American Progress, a relentlessly left-wing attack machine operating as a think tank. Podesta describes the center as "a liberal think tank on steroids." (Marianne Jennings wrote an excellent 2003 column providing background on the center, reporting that the center's 2004 budget was an astounding $10 million.)
The center's blog is Think Progress. Both the center and the blog are unstinting critics of the Bush adminstration. On September 7 the TP blog posted its "Katrina timeline." It is a highly tendentious, obviously partisan and unreliable document. (We have previously recommended Rick Moran's "Katrina: Response timeline" posted on the Rightwing Nuthouse blog).
On September 11 the Minneapolis Star Tribune featured a "Timeline of key events in the Katrina story" in its expanded Sunday opinion section. The Star Tribune credited the timeline graphic to Kim Vu, but left the text of the timeline unsourced, apparently intending its readers to believe that the timeline was the creation of its editors. The Star Tribune timeline, however, bears a striking resemblance to the TP blog timeline; it is in fact essentially an edited version of the TP timeline.
Take the Star Tribune timeline entries for August 30 as an example. The TP timeline states: "BUSH SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT NAVAL BASE CORONADO." The Strib timeline states: "Bush gives speech on Iraq at California naval base." The TP timeline states: "MASS LOOTING REPORTED..." The Strib timeline states: "Mass looting reported." The TP timeline states:
U.S.S. BATAAN SITS OFF SHORE, VIRTUALLY UNUSED: “The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore. The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents. But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty.”The Strib timeline states:
USS Bataan sits off Louisiana coast, awaiting relief orders. Its water-making capacity, hospital beds, food and other supplies go unused.(John debunked the Bataan canard last week at length in "Krugmania, continued.") The Strib timeline states: "Bush plays guitar with Mark Willis, then returns to Crawford, Texas." The TP timeline states: "PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS...BUSH RETURNS TO CRAWFORD FOR FINAL NIGHT OF VACATION."
The derivative nature of the Star Tribune timeline would properly be characterized as plagiarism under a typical university honor code provision defining plagiarism as "the act of passing off as one's own the ideas or writings of another." Such plagiarism is also usually deemed serious journalistic misconduct. What could account for the Star Tribune's failure to attribute the credit due Think Progress for the timeline other than a desire to present partisan talking points as a fair record of events? (Thanks to reader John Gushwa.)
UPDATE: A reader adds:
I note in the timelines in your post about the Star Tribune and Think Progress that they both note the president playing the guitar. The problem is they both misspelled the name of the entertainer, whose name is Mark Wills, not Willis. Not that I would expect anyone but us nekulturney rednecks to notice.
