Chris Hedges, liar: and exactly why would this be surprising?
In June The New Republic published an article about famous lefty journalist Chris Hedges’, whose egregious plagiarism had been discovered by Harper’s in 2010 when he submitted an article with obvious unattributed borrowings from other sources:
…[T]his discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times…[and] won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University…He is the author of twelve books…A leading moralist of the left, however, had now been caught plagiarizing at one of the oldest magazines of the left.
Harper’s had no ideological gripe with Hedges and no reason to distrust or dislike him; it’s a lefty magazine and Hedges is a leftist. However, not only did the periodical discover that Hedges was plagiarizing in a big way, but when confronted by Harper’s about it he was arrogant and deceptive to them as well:
“Hedges not only used another journalist’s quotes,” says the fact-checker, “but he used them in first-person scenes, claiming he himself gathered the quotes. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen as a fact-checker at the magazine. And it was endemic throughout the piece.”
The fact-checker spoke on the phone with Hedges at least three times and exchanged about a dozen e-mails with him. “He was very unhelpful from the beginning, and very aggressive,” said the fact-checker.
Back in 2003 a University of Texas classics professor named Thomas Palaima, who had read Hedge’s 2002 book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning from “a sympathetic progressive standpoint,” liked it, and wanted to use it as part of the syllabus of a course he was teaching, had found it contained an unattributed quote from Hemingway. He notified Hedge’s publisher, thinking it a mere oversight, but the pushback he got made him think a lot more than that one incident might be going on. He wrote a piece in the Austin paper about the plagiarism he had found, but spoke with Hedges before it was published, which resulted in a similar arrogance and further denial from Hedges. Palaima (who, remember, is a “progressive” and was originally a Hedges fan), says:
Plutarch said that little details reveal the character of the man. If Hedges was found in a small matter to have further compounded his dishonesty, it makes you wonder about more important matters.
Harper’s no longer publishes Hedges since the 2010 incident. However, he had already served the left’s purpose many times over by that time. One of the ways in which Hedges had done that was in this Harper’s article published in October of 2001, in which he wrote of IDF soldiers vis a vis Palestinian children in Gaza:
Children have been shot in other countries I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
That gives you an idea of the flavor of Hedges’ writing. I read the piece at the time it appeared, long before my political change experience but during what in retrospect must have been the very early stages of it. His assertions had shocked and saddened me back then, but it hadn’t occurred to me when I first read them that Hedges might just be flat-out lying.
Here’s CAMERA’s treatment of that Hedges article. Pay particular attention from points 4 to the end. If you read it, you will see why it is almost certain that Hedges was lying in that article, and not just once but many many times. However, the article was very influential as part of the left’s campaign against Israel. By 2010 the magazine’s fact-checker may have become interested in making sure Hedges didn’t plagiarize in his articles, but it appears there was never an interest at Harper’s in making sure he didn’t lie in them, as long as those lies fit nicely into the preferred leftist narrative.
I did the research for the above post about a month ago and wrote a draft for it, before the present Gaza crisis heated up. So until just now I hadn’t realized that Hedges is still claiming and repeating his long-ago charges from that earlier skirmish. Now that Hedges no longer is allowed to write for the well-known leftist periodicals that used to like to publish his work, he is a columnist for the Orwellian-titled Truthdig, and in a piece from just yesterday he wrote:
Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories””required under the rules of American journalism””although we know they are untrue.
I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way.
If you read the entire new Hedges piece you’ll see that it’s about how Israel lies and how Hedges tells the truth, and is filled with his self-righteous sense of himself as truth teller against the evil Israeli liars. But what possible reason would anyone have to believe anything he says, other than the desire to believe it?
Even the NY Times, no friend of Israel, has a different story to tell about why Palestinian children throw stones and how often they do so. You can see from their description that IDF soldiers taunting the children (some of whom are older teenagers) is hardly a necessary goad, but rather that Palestinians throwing stones is an old and hallowed tradition passed down from father to son (see also this), as well as potentially very dangerous to those at whom the stones are thrown.
Adding just a little more to the picture we have of Hedges, there’s this piece from 2011 by Sam Harris, a fellow writer about whose work Hedges has written often and mendaciously:
After my first book was published, the journalist Chris Hedges seemed to make a career out of misrepresenting its contents – asserting, among other calumnies, that somewhere in its pages I call for an immediate, nuclear first strike on the entire Muslim world. Hedges spread this lie so sedulously that I could have spent years writing letters to the editor. Even if I had been willing to squander my time in this way, such letters are generally pointless, as few people read them. In the end, I decided to create a page on my website addressing such controversies, so that I can then forget all about them. The result has been less than satisfying. Several years have passed, and I still meet people at public talks and in comment threads who believe that I support the outright murder of hundreds of millions of innocent people.
In an apparent attempt to become the most tedious person on Earth, Hedges has attacked me again on this point…
I have participated in many debates over the years and engaged many of my critics. In fact, I once debated Hedges at a benefit for Truthdig. You can watch our exchange here. I am happy to say that these encounters are usually very pleasant – for even when they grow prickly on the stage, the exchange in the green room is generally quite warm. My meeting with Hedges was a notable exception. In fact, Hedges is the one person I have told event organizers that I will not appear with again for any reason – which is a pity, because his inability to present or follow an argument makes everything one says sound incisive. The man is not only wrong in his convictions, but dishonest””and determined to remain so. I trust this is a consequence of his most conspicuous quality as a person: sanctimony.
The consistency is impressive. One begins to wonder whether, as Mary McCarthy famously said of Lillian Hellman, “every word she writes is a lie, including ”˜and’ and ”˜the.’ ” Just change the pronoun to “he” and you’ve got it.
Harris wrote that Hedges has seemed to make a career out of misrepresenting Harris’ first book. But that’s way too narrow a charge against Hedges. Actually, he seems to have made a career—and a quite illustrious one until recently—appropriating the work of others, and misrepresenting the truth to conform with leftist needs. Both are bad things to do, but it’s the latter offense that is far more destructive.
so?
dont mean a thing
does it?
Exactly so.
Jason Blair anybody? He lied and plagiarized until it became so obvious it couldn’t be covered up. The lefties are full of sanctimonious self righteousness. Remember the commencement speech given by the younger Sulzberger to the 2006 graduating class of the State University of New York?
http://www.massnews.com/2006_editions/5_May/52406_pinch_confesses_to_failed_life.htm
Wow. A leftie lied. Repeatedly. Who woulda thunk it?
To me, the point of this post is not that a lefty lied. That almost goes without saying.
The point is that his lies were so egregious and so constant that even lefty mags have turned on him, but for the less serious reason (plagiarism). And yet he continues to churn out the very same stuff and do his damage,and with most of his readers his reputation remains stellar (Pulitzer Prize intact and all that).
If you say what’s the use of writing about this phenomenon, you might say what’s the use of writing (or reading) about almost anything.
I write about it because I find it to be of interest, especially since I read Hedges’ 2001 article before I understood what he was doing. So I’ve looked at his writing from both sides now.
I would like Neo to do a look-inside-his-head on Hedges. Why is he such a knave despite being so thoroughly outed by the dogs that used to run with him?
Secondarily, a question we likely cannot answer: Who feeds him? Vlad the Putin? Probably not. Who? and Why? People like Hedges pretty much insist on living well; they do not stint.
Without knowing very much more about Hedges than Neo has written here, I’m in agreement with Don Carlos in suspecting that Hedges has been ‘bought’ and is shilling for one of those parties most violently opposed to the existence of Israel.
The sudden reemergence of a particularly nasty kind of Jew-hatred in the last thirty years is … extremely troubling. I can’t help suspecting that it has been nurtured carefully, and with a great deal of money funneled to useful idiots.
Aaahhhhhhhhh….Shades of little Stephen Glass at The New Republic back, now, several years ago. Bless their little hearts. ((-:
I am only slowly reading your lengthy post.
I was a lifelong news junky. But The Age of Obama has taught me to read less and less “news” because I know Leftists distort the facts. Therefore to read as much as I was used to is self-abuse. I stopped.
Instead, I read classics more. Instead, I rely on others I can trust more, when online. I gave up any NYTimes reading habit in 1999 because of the Big Lie – “it’s all about sex” – that shaped at the conclusion of Clinton’s impeachment. (The NYTimes became the principal tool advancing that Big Lie.)
Occasionally, I’ll read “Mother Jones” or go to their facebook page. For example, today I read of all the reader-push back by GMO histrionics over Neil deGrasse Tyson’s critique. People wax apopleptic defending spurious distinctions of what is Truly “natural” – and thus right – in the old hippy New Age religion.
Which brings me to a question directed to our host, neo-neocon. What accounts for Hedges cause-driven lying, as viewed through generalizations about Leftist political psychology?
Leftists need to lie and distort reality through mechanisms of denial and diversion – if I understand this correctly. The best lies are those sincerely “Believed.” (And I concede that we all virtually do this, at some level, eg, denial of death.)
Your piece is about how much Hedge’s has been a “useful traveller” for advancing the Leftist cause. And now that he’s not so useful, he himself cannot introspect or usefully examine his own conscience.
This is a common human failing, of course. But in the moral arts and sciences like news and opinion journalism, it is a destructive one. And among public intellectuals leading a corrupted polity, dangerously so.
Today, we live in an Age of Empowered Leftism, where Leftists believe their distortions of reality, and the Middle East is an excellent case in point – Leftists earnestly Believe in Lies about the PLA/Hamas and Israel. Nothing penetrates to re-order their distorting mechanisms.
We’ve seen what becomes a genuine Truth-teller of worthy but not brilliant minds, eg, Sarah Palin. They are lied about and the lies become the Truth.
Today, the Great Leftist lights who become Guided by the Light of Truth and thereby bear witness to it, like Christopher Hitchens, are dying off. These voices, like David Mamet and Melanie Phillips, grow fewer and rarer over time.
Perhaps I’ve lost my simple pointed question – the search for personal tipping points (cf, your own “Changing a Mind…” series) in political change – what are they? Which? And when?
Bearing my own witness comes in abandoning simplistic libertarian isolationism, between the Fall of Communism and 9/11. The first showed me that the Left was in outright denial and neocons were correct about the deep evil nature of communism, as well as the Left’s ideologically entrenched dishonesty. The second, that Ron Paul’s reflexive “Blowback” thesis was empirically wrong, requiring a twisting and mangling of facts – and thus the “reality” that was perceived – but I could no longer stomach it. I had to reform. I became a more pragmatic libertarian, instead of a (stereotypical) dogmatic one. (I still oppose Jeane Kirkpatrick-style reflexively altruistic neo-cons; instead, I champion realist and national self-interest in foreign affairs.)
I’ll now return to digesting your observations about Hedges in the above post. And maybe I’ll have more precise questions to pose here, later.
He seeks personal gain in service of ideological ‘truth’. As the first sacrifice upon ideology’s altar is actual truth, promotion of the ideology requires that all necessary means be employed to acquire the end point sought. Upon that calculus, lying in service of the ideology is literally an obligation. Arguably, a ‘holy’ obligation.
Hedges’ continued loyalty to the left’s ideology means that forgiveness by the left is always a future possibility. His expulsion is merely a reflection of his limited usefulness at this point. Upon the triumph of the left, he will make a fine addition to a new “Ministry of Truth’.
Or, should Islam triumph, his ‘surprise’ conversion to Islam is nearly certain with his documented antipathy to Israel his ticket to Muslim authenticity. I suspect that to be a possible, though secondary motivation for many on the left’s antisemitism. It’s always wise to have an ‘escape route’ planned.
If Hedges has been bought off, then he’s simply getting paid for what he used to do for free.
It must be a core part of his character, because there’s no need for him to attack fellow lefties when questioned. There’s no financial incentive for him to do it, either.
(BTW, kudos to the one professor…anyone who quotes Plutarch can’t be all bad).
There are several motivations for this type of lefty behavior, but I’ve settled on the “Salieri Complex” as being most common:
(I know the real Salieri wasn’t as portrayed in Amadeus, but that’s the popular conception)
Envy and ambition mixed with incompetence. These people crave social status, but don’t have the talents to achieve it themselves. They see others succeeding, and assume they must either be cheating or bad people.
This rationalization then frees them morally to commit all sorts of inequities to exact “justice” (and coincidentally, get ahead themselves).
Anyone who denies the special validity of the Truth must be a twisted soul.
This is where evil is created.
Run of the mill leftists do not think deeply about what they believe any more than a dog has to think about scratching at fleas.People like hedges know exactly what they are doing. Hedges is lying like a rug because he knows he will be rewarded and the zombies will believe his lies and applaud like seals flapping flippers for a fish. Dogs, fleas, and seals and fish; that is the left in a nutshell.
The list just keeps on growing.
Parker you didn’t give even one single fact about run of the mill leftists. Also, you have no telepathic powers and you can’t read the mind of a dog. I would assume it responds to a flea bite just like you would respond to a mosquito bite. When dealing with the dangers of the outside you can’t waste your time thinking about the action you know you need to take, however you should have a better awareness of your surroundings than a dog, a seal or a smelly hippy.
In re-reading, yes, I recall L’Affair Hedges – such a risible one. And depressing.
I have fewer and fewer Leftists I can call frriends, if only because this kind of sanctimonious and sefl-righteous reflection has become increasingly common in real life, just as it has among the cognoscenti.
Thomas Sowell has a piece, today, confronting Geraldo Rivera on Israel and Hamas. Sowell demands that we see and seek out and demand clear thinking.
That the Left has been seduced by PoMo rationales has exacerbated the decline of public discourse, such that we cannot have debates about the most important issues of our time. They are always ruled unfair, tout court.
It has accelerated, this declines, and makes participation in public realms all the more fruitless and degrading. People, Americans to their soul, need to leave and take their Americanism with them. We need such islands of liberty if we are ever to see it reborn, somewhere, somehow, someday.
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