Chris Anderson, Elizabeth Hasselbeck Both Accused of Plagiarism

Chris Anderson has made a name for himself as editor of Wired and, even more so, as author of the books The Long Tail and Free. But a number of critics are coming forward, alleging that in writing the latter, Anderson made relatively free use of the work of others without adequate credit.

The first to get on the scent was Waldo Jaquith in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.

According to Gawker, Anderson claims that it was accidental and that much of the lack of credit stemmed from a last moment “inability to find a good citation format for web sources.”

But apparently the alleged plagiarism … uh, unintentional repurposing goes farther. Blogger Edward Champion did his own analysis and found that “the VQR’s investigations only begin to scratch the surface.” According to him, a cursory search showed instances of Anderson having taken material almost unchanged from blogs, books, and web sites. In one case, even when he gave credit to the source, his version was so close that he might as well have directly quoted the original.

And in aother part of the happy media landscape, self-published author Susan Hassett is suing The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck, claiming that the television personality had received her book on dealing with Celiac disease and then proceeded to use it as the basis for her own book on the subject. TMZ.com has a response from Hasselbeck’s representatives, stating that there is no basis for the allegations. The site also has Hassett’s letter to Hasselbeck with some comparisons. They seem borderline until you realize, as journalist and blogger Anita Bartholomew did, that in one section, both mistakenly used the word “isles” instead of “aisles” in the same way, which she found unlikely. Couldn’t Hasselbeck’s publisher afford a copy editor?

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