*************************************************************** The AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1275 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005, and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $20 a year and 1st class to those contributing $30 a year or more. Non-members subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail). *************************************************************** December 1990 THE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. PLAGIARISM SCANDAL IS BEING UNDERSTATED BY THE media, according to Ted Pappas, assistant editor of Chronicles, a magazine published by the Rockford Institute of Rockford, Ill. Pappas says Chronicles will be publishing an article about this. It will charge that the plagiarism was "overwhelming" and that it has been known for years. He says the London Sunday Tele- graph got wind of it in December 1989 but that the King Papers Project director Clayborne Carson told the paper that it was not true that there was any plagiarism. Later, an American journalist connected to a college tried to break the story, but he backed off when threatened with loss of his job. Pappas also charges that the National Endowment for the Humanities, headed by Lynn Cheney, learned of the plagiarism over a year ago but did nothing about it. The NEH has provided major funding for the King Papers Project, which has fallen far behind schedule in publishing King's papers as it has tried to decide how to handle the plagiarized works. In the meantime, Arizonans are taking a beating for voting down a paid holiday honoring King. *************************************************************** February 1991 PRESS HID MARTIN LUTHER KING SCANDAL On Dec. 3, 1989, the London Sunday Telegraph carried an explosive item in its "Mandrake" column concerning evidence that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarized parts of his 1955 doctoral dissertation at Boston University. The London paper told exactly where King stole his material -- from a paper written by another Boston University student, one Jack Boozer. It told how editors of the King papers were agonizing how to release the story, which they feared would damage King's reputation. The item ended, "The story has not yet been published in the United States." Now the Sunday Telegraph has a circulation of almost 600,000, and it is indexed on the computerized Nexis database system which is used by most American news organizations. It is read in the London bureaus of American media companies. Nonetheless, the story lay dormant for almost eleven months, until November 1990, when the Wall Street Journal published a definitive study of King's academic cheating. And now several major news outlets in the United States are admitting they knew of the story, but did not pursue it with enough vigor to get into print. These organizations include the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Journal and Constitution in King's home town of Atlanta. The only American paper to publish the King story before the Wall Street Journal article appeared was The Spotlight, an obscure weekly in Washington. It ran a brief item in January 1990 based on the Sunday Telegraph story. Why the media reluctance to pursue a scandal that would be embarrassing to the late civil rights leader? In press interviews lately several editors claimed lack of specific information about details of King's plagiarism. A reporter from the Washington Post claims he was misled by an official of the King papers project who downplayed the significance of the charge. The editor of the New Republic had more specific information but wanted to be careful in doing what he called an "explosive story." Several historians refused to take an assignment to write the article for the New Republic. We feel more than journalistic caution was at work in the de facto suppression of the King story for almost a year. Martin Luther King remains a worshiped figure to the liberal media, which has long ignored the seamy side of the preacher's life. Only with great reluctance did the mainstream media publish accounts of King's flagrant adultery. Frank Johnson is the British journalist who writes the Mandrake column for the Sunday Telegraph. He says he got the lead on his King scoop from a British professor who had heard American colleagues discussing the looming scandal. He says he was not surprised that the American media ignored his story. . As Johnson said in a recent interview, "American reporters' inquisitiveness and powers of perception tend to fail them on questions of race, gender and gays." In other words, the American media intends to protect its own herd of sacred cows, even at the expense of honest journalism. *************************************************************** April 1992 Flagrant King Plagiarism Detailed You probably won't be reading any front page stories about this touchy subject, or seeing any accounts on network television. But a new book details startling information about the extent to which the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarized the works of other persons during his career. The liberal community was shaken two years ago with revelations that King passed off other people's words as his own in writing his doctoral dissertation at Boston University. Admirers gave King the benefit of the doubt _ saying he meant to credit the quoted material but forgot, or that a young student had unwittingly mixed up his own work with material he copied elsewhere. Well, those excuses no longer hold water. The new book is entitled "Voice of Deliverance, The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources." Those last words _ and its sources _ go to the core of King's chronic intellectual dishonesty. The author is Professor Keith D. Miller, of Arizona State University, who is not unsympathetic to King. As Miller's book details, King systematically plagiarized the work of other persons throughout his life. Even his Nobel Peace Prize lecture was a rip-off. In that speech King spoke movingly about a widely separated family inheriting a house in which they all had to live together. An original story? No. Professor Miller writes that King cribbed it from a Florida minister, J. Wallace Hamilton, who had written about the same family situation in _ we quote _ "the exact same words." Miller gives numerous other examples. A speech about his admiration of the Indian pacifist Mahatma Ghandi was stolen _ again, we quote _ "word from word" from a 1957 speech by Harris Wofford, now a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. The list of sources from which King took unattributed material seems almost endless _ other ministers, the Bible, Shakespeare, educators. Miller is gentle with the plagiarizing King. He argues that King came out of a folk preacher culture where _ quote "preachers borrow partly because their culture fails to define the word as a commodity and instead assumes that everyone creates language and no one owns it." Professor Miller continues that ministers such as King borrowed freely from other preachers _ "treating sermons as shared blessings." King, he concluded, simply did not understand nor appreciate the rules of what he called "print culture." You perhaps remember the savagery with which the media fell on Senator Joe Biden of Delaware in 1988 when he was caught cribbing a few passages from a speech from a British politician. Biden was forced to drop out of the Democratic Presidential race. Why doesn't the media give similar attention to the revelations about Martin Luther King's plagiarism, which lasted his entire public life? Washington Post writer Juan Williams wrote in his paper's book section, "At its base this book is an indictment of a plagiarist." Why weren't those words in the front page _ rather than buried in the book section? We suggest the media are still protecting one of their all time favorite sacred cows.