The former Fox News analyst who is set to play a key role in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is apparently a fan of writing via copy and paste. Monica Crowley, who will serve as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, plagiarized as many as 50 times in her book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened, reports CNN.
CNN discovered that Crowley’s book included some paragraphs that were copied pretty much word for word from numerous sources, including mainstream publications, conservative think tanks, websites, and, of course, Wikipedia. The outlets include Fox News, the BBC, Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Investopedia, to name a few.
As part of its investigation, CNN includes some pretty damning side-by-side examples:
CNN
Crowley did not comment, but Trump’s transition team is standing by her, labeling any questions about her book as nothing but a “politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing the country.”
This is not the first time Crowley has been called out for her seeming fondness to lift other people’s work. In a 1999 piece for Slate, Timothy Noah wrote about how a Wall Street Journal column by Crowley strongly resembled a 1988 article in Commentary. At the time the Journal ran an editor’s note: “Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article.” Despite the striking similarities between her piece and the 1988 article, Crowley vehemently denied to Noah that she had plagiarized: “I did not plagiarize. Absolutely not.”
