Friday, March 15, 2013

More Semi-Plagiarism from Pope Paul the Unlearned



Here is the post.

But here is the original review of Bell's new book.

How does an editor at CPH get away with this?

Here is the transitional sentence, enlarged for my readers. I had to look for it -

These remarks are spot on:


This is a continuation of his method of writing one whole paragraph and gliding into someone else's work. The overall impression is one long post of carefully considered ideas. The author and title of the original post are obscured, that is hidden, by embedding the link.

He could embed the link this way, at the beginning of a paragraph.

Trevin Wax, on his blog Gospel Coalition, wrote the following about Bell's book:

One cheap trick like this would be a firing offense for a journalist. The concept is clear - give the impression of writing a long post, but leave a bolt-hole to say to critics - "There is the place where I admitted copying the whole thing."

It makes everyone wonder about the integrity of CPH, since this behavior is rewarded.

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bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "More Semi-Plagiarism from Pope Paul the Unlearned":

I see the the first three short paragraphs are by McCain. He says he didn't read Rob Bell's latest book, but then says he found "These remarks are spot on." How can one say that w/o reading or even scanning the book? McCain says he doesn't have to smell each garbage can to know they stink, but with McCain's mega-salary, I'd bet he throws some pretty nice things out. I'd bet that plenty of stuff Paul put out on the curb has been retrieved and ended up selling on ebay.

McCain's real envy has more to do, I think, with the fact that Rob Bell sells his books for $10 to $15 new, and only $8 for the e-versions. Now if McCain could do that with CPH books (and not just during sales), I'd say he's really worth his mega-salary. BTW, Rob Bell's publisher is HarperOne of HarperCollins, and HarperCollins (and Zondervan with its NIV 2011) is owned by Murdoch's NewsCorp.

As the Ichablog post notes, McCain doesn't put the giant quotation in quote marks, and doesn't indent it either. For someone just scanning McCain's blog, one would think he put many hours of work and contemplation into this post, until one read the details.

I think McCain introduces and then glides into other people's work is he doesn't want to give the impression that his blog is more anthology than original thinking, and reproducing so much content (instead of snippets) from other blogs means his blog doesn't become a mere jumping-off spot to other blogs. It's stealing web traffic, really. Why read other blogs when one can just read McCains?

Often McCain doesn't even glide into other people's works, such as when he quotes the Catholic Encyclopedia. Why? Evidently because that source is beyond copyright, so the authors and compilers are dead, and they have no legal standing even if they lived to be 200 years old. So they can't get Paul in hot water for giving the appearance that the work is his all the way until the very end where Paul gives the link to the source. Paul ought to show dead authors the same respect he grudgingly gives to live authors:

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http://cyberbrethren.com/2013/03/13/more-baloney-from-bell/

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Murdoch's News Corporation (Zondervan with its new NIV is also a subsidiary of NewsCorp)
http://www.linkedin.com/company/harpercollins-publishers

HarperCollins Publishers is one of the world’s leading English-language publishers. Headquartered in New York, the company is a subsidiary of News Corporation.

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Rupert Murdoch: Bible mogul | Geez Magazine
www.geezmagazine.org/.../rupert-murdochs-big-bible-busines...

Jul 14, 2011 – But few people know that Murdoch also owns Zondervan, the world's largest publisher of Bibles.