Did you know that Sheriff David Clarke, who is joining the Trump administration as assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, is a plagiarist? That he fraudulently got his master’s degree in security studies by fraudulently taking credit for passages someone else wrote? Dozens of times?
I hope not, because he plagiarized nothing. But if you are a reader of CNN, every word you just read about Sheriff Clarke will ring true, because that is what the network is calling him.
From the just-published hit piece by Andrew Kaczynski, Christopher Massie and Nathan McDermott – all of whom should be ashamed of themselves:
Controversial Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who this week announced he will be joining Donald Trump’s administration as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, plagiarized sections of his 2013 master’s thesis on US security, a CNN KFile review has found.
Clarke, a visible surrogate for Trump during the campaign known for his incendiary rhetoric, earned a master’s degree in security studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In his thesis, “Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible,” Clarke failed to properly attribute his sources at least 47 times.
In all instances reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Clarke lifts language from sources and credits them with a footnote, but does not indicate with quotation marks that he is taking the words verbatim.
According to guidelines on plagiarism posted on the Naval Postgraduate School’s website, “If a passage is quoted verbatim, it must be set off with quotation marks (or, if it is a longer passage, presented as indented text), and followed by a properly formulated citation. The length of the phrase does not matter. If someone else’s words are sufficiently significant to be worth quoting, then accurate quotation followed by a correct citation is essential, even if only a few words are involved.”
Translation: after first teeing up the intended negativity by calling David Clarke “controversial” and “incendiary”, CNN has determined that Clarke attributed every one of the passages they claim he plagiarized. His mistake is in how he did so, nothing else.
This is the equivalent of someone calling your child a criminal because she rode her bike on the sidewalk.
It is one thing to claim that Sheriff Clarke did not properly make the attributions. And to point out that this falls under the technical definition of plagiarism. But the entire tilt of this story is that Clarke pretended he came up with those words instead of giving full attribution to their authors. And he obviously did no such thing.
That’ll teach him to be a law enforcement officer – a Black one at that – who supports Donald Trump. They’re the worst kind, don’t you know?
CNN has become the punch line of its own joke. And what it has ceased to be is any source of credible news.
When they want to get you, they’ll stop at nothing. The amount of time devoted to going over everything Clarke ever said or wrote is considerable. Figure it was done for EVERY senior and mid-level appointment . . . . . . that is a LOT of money George Soros is paying.