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.
