partisan shoutfests

Filed under: Plagiarism
4 Comments

This morning, I read a couple of articles about a White House aide being caught plagiarizing.

Then I read a piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, eulogizing William F. Buckley. It contains this sentence:

Buckley disdained the kind of partisan shoutfests that too often pass for political debate on our TVs today.

And then I turned to a New York Times article by Eric Konigsberg about Buckley's TV show Firing Line. It starts with this question:

The relationship of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line” to the partisan shoutfests that pass for evening political exchange on television nowadays?

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call plagiarism here. I can imagine two different people coming up with those sentences independently, and anyway it's only one sentence of similarity; the articles are otherwise entirely different.

But it still strikes me as odd. I thought for a moment that perhaps "partisan shoutfests" was a common/standard description of political TV shows, but a Google search for the phrase (in quotation marks) turns up only eight occurrences of it on the web, of which four are copies or quotes of the Konigsberg piece, and one is the vanden Heuvel piece. The remaining three don't have any other phrasing in common with the sentences in question.

Anyway. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this, much less commented on it, if plagiarism and copying hadn't already been on my mind. But given that it was on my mind, I thought this was an interesting enough item to post about.

4 Responses to “partisan shoutfests”

  1. Vardibidian

    Good catch—not just “partisan shoutfests” but “pass for” as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if one writer had read the other and internalized the phrase without realizing it. It’s the sort of thing (a few words, not a sentence) that a writer could easily believe he had come up with, but actually sparked from somewhere else.

    Also, I have seen a couple of articles on Mr. Buckley that have attempted, in a half-hearted way, to mimic what they imagine to be his style, by using a combination of hi-falutin’ words with neologisms and slang, embedded in complex sentence structures. I wonder if this stems from such an impulse…

    Finally, one of the things that’s tricky with people like Mr. Buckley is that they had massive private correspondences and conversations with the people who are writing about them. I find it plausible that Mr. Buckley himself used the phrase “partisan shoutfests that pass for [my show]”, in conversation, and that the two reporters got it from him, either directly or indirectly.

    Finally, there’s lexis-nexis. Bill Adair referred to “cable TV shoutfests and partisan blogs” in September 2006 in the St. Petersburg Times. The show Crossfire was called a shoutfest in several articles about its cancellation in 2005 that also noticed its partisan nature, sometimes in a quote from John Stewart’s 2004 appearance, in which he called the hosts “partisan hacks”. Bill Moyers also complained about cable shoutfests and their partisan hosts and guests.

    Howie Kurtz in 1998’s Spin Cycle refers to “all manner of partisan magazines and radio talk shows and television shoutfests and Internet chat groups…”; I’m wondering, now if that’s the Ur-source.

    Thanks,
    -V.

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  2. Jed

    I should’ve said more clearly: it’s not just “partisan shoutfests” and “pass for,” it’s almost the entire second halves of the sentences that match:

    …partisan shoutfests that [too often] pass for [evening] political [debate/exchange] on [our] [TVs/television] [today/nowadays].

    So I agree that one writer could easily have internalized it from the other, but it’s pretty specific. And neither of them had much time to internalize it from the other–I’m not sure which article appeared first, but both articles have appeared in the three days since Buckley died.

    But yeah, it’s certainly possible that both writers internalized it from another source, such as Buckley, Adair, Stewart, Moyers, or Kurtz; thanks for pointing those out.

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  3. AL

    Nah it was just plagiarism.

    Odd how journalists have trouble coming up with different language when they plagiarise a thought. Maybe because they deal in the cliches of the moment. That is their role.

    reply

  4. AL

    Nah it was just plagiarism.

    Odd how journalists have trouble coming up with different language when they plagiarise a thought. Maybe because they deal in the cliches of the moment. That is their role.

    reply

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