Editor’s statement

Pathetic. Dan, what has happened to you?

I have not read _The Bluest State_, so I don’t really know how to do a comparison.But just to check this out for myself I pulled out 5 books. A couple were immediately unsuited to comparison (Reich’s _Locked in the Cabinet_ is a memoir – no footnotes; Diffie and Landau’s _Privacy on the Line_ is more academic – 40 pages of notes for 240 pages of material, plus a bibliography and an index).That left 3:Moore and Slater’s _The Architect_, Woodward’s _Plan of Attack_, and Greenwald’s _How Would a Patriot Act?_.Greenwald’s reads like a series of op-eds. He quotes extensively and has attributions in with the text. No footnotes._The Architect_ is extensively sourced – 30 pages of notes for 277 pages of material. This I think is pretty standard for “attack” books. In the Internet age, everything in this sort of book is vigorously checked by the attackees and their defenders.Woodward’s is FULL of quotes, and very little of it is attributed. There are acknowledgments of many reporters and the Post’s editorial staff.Did Woodward catch any heat for his attribution style?

Actually, Woodward has taken a huge amount of heat for his attribution style over the years, but it doesn’t seem to stop him.

Mike: I think I’ve been doing both. But since this all started as an attack on Keller, I would suggest that “everybody else does it” has to be the first fact that we establish.

As the Anon. who issued the “challenge” for 10 examples of books in the same genre with citation and attribution practices similar to Keller’s, I want to point out that I’m not even asking about footnotes, necessarily. The bar is much lower than that. I’m looking for relevant examples in which the author frequently uses other sources with no attribution at all, i.e., doesn’t even say “so-and-so told the Globe,” or whatever.And Dan – It seems that others here are able to grab books off the shelf and address this question with far less trouble and effort than you appear to think would be required. And it doesn’t really seem like anyone’s getting “slimed,” either.

Dan, this Keller stuff is an even bigger hit than your Bronson Arroyo love train. Ride the hot hand!

Bronson Arroyo wouldn’t have made the 2007 Red Sox post-season roster.Of course, he’s available for your slow-pitch softball team. Just ask the Reds. They don’t want him. They even said so.

Dan, you are more fun than should be allowed. “Might have helped?” At least you’re coming back to Earth. The Reds made a mistake by extending Arroyo’s contract, something they acknowledged this year when they offered him all around the league (and there were no takers, I might add).Pena’s problem was he never got to play everyday. He has a long swing and his timing gets thrown off if he sits. In Washington, where Mickey Mantle would have trouble homering, he played everyday and hit 8 HRs/133 ABs and put up a .293/.352/.504 (BA/OBP/SLG) line. If JD Drew or Coco Crisp did that here, they would be sainted. He was, and is, a better bet to excel than Arroyo.I don’t want to be a GM. But I would make a damn better one that Schilling. Remember, he didn’t want to come to Boston in the first place because he is a flyball pitcher and mistakenly believed his stats would be hurt by Fenway. It took a stathead (Epstein) to prove him wrong. And if you look at the persons who have been the most successful GMs, they have not been professional baseball players (what does it say that none of the GMs of the playoff teams this year played major league ball?). When are you going to wake up and let the facts form your opinion, instead of the other way around?

So, there I was, about to doze off Friday night, and then there they were, on the midnight repeat of Beat the Press, offering up lame excuses for Jon Keller.- Dan, I actually felt sorry for you. Your assertions here notwithstanding, your visible discomfort on the show seemed to indicate that you get the gravity of the situation. But why were you silent when a couple of the panelists agreed that all Keller needed to do was to include a disclaimer – 3 lines, I think someone suggested – stating that some of the material in the book had been taken from news reports written by others? First of all, it’s my understanding such a disclaimer is already in the preface to the book. More importantly, you know that is not sufficient. Each reference to work done by others needed to have at least some form of attribution.- Amazon says Keller’s book is 272 pages. I don’t know if that includes preface and index or not. Whatever. If I heard right, it was stated on the show that there were about 3 dozen unattributed passages. That’s an average of one every 7 or 8 pages, at least. Which just seems like . . . . a lot. And given that many of them were probably used to hammer home some point, as in the case of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s remarks on the Cape wind project, I wonder, how much book would there have been without all that material taken from others without attribution? Isn’t it probably the case that if he had attributed everything properly, it would have been painfully obvious that he was relying too heavily on the work of others, that he had thrown together a collection of anecdotes and observations based on other people’s reporting and called it a book?

From the Herald’s comparison piece:The Bluest State,pg.170“Thank God, she didn’t suffer,” said Angel Del Valle, the forty-six-year-old Puerto Rican grocery-store clerk who never even heard his wife scream as she was crushed to death by the most expensive public-construction project in American history. “It was like a bomb.” Boston Globe, 7/12/06Still, one of his few consolations, he said, was that his wife probably felt very little, if any, pain. He believes Milena died immediately.“Thank God, she didn’t suffer,” he said.Boston Herald, 7/12/06“It was like a bomb,” Angel “Papo” Luis Del Valle told the Herald, speaking Spanish through a translator as he stood at the gate of his sister’s Roxbury home.

Two more glaring examples from the Herald’s comparison. You actually think the reader would be clear that Keller is refencing someone else’s work because he uses past tense? The Bluest State,pg.80Jack Duffy, chairman of the Wellesley Democratic Town Committee and a Jacques supporter, agreed that Lynch’s focus on health care and education had proven more relevant to voters than his candidate’s agenda. “If you ask the average suburban voter, ‘What do you think of Cheryl Jacques?’ they’ll say she is a feminist candidate who has abortion on her mind,” he said.The Boston Globe, 10/4/01Jack Duffy, chairman of the Wellesley Democratic Town Committee and a Jacques supporter, said Lynch did a much better job of talking about health care and education, while Jacques and her handlers, through the television advertising they aired, appeared focused on narrower issues that motivate party activists but not a large number of voters.“And yet,” he said, “I don’t think they did a good job of getting the issue across to the voters. If you ask the average suburban voter ‘What do you think of Cheryl Jacques?’ they’ll say she’s a feminist candidate who has abortion on her mind.”The Bluest State,pg.120Wellesley College political science Professor Marion Just saw a cross-generational union taking form. “There is a youthful anti-war movement who have the hippie generation to wake up with, and they are alarmed at how quickly we appear headed to war,” she said.The Boston Globe, 11/16/02“There is a youthful antiwar movement who have the hippie generation to wake up with,” said Wellesley political science professor Marion Just. “And they are alarmed at how quickly we appear headed to war.”

Anon 11:04: I’ve said all that needs to be said. The proof of that is that you are now dealing in out-and-out misinformation. You’re relying on a previous commenter’s post, rather than on the book itself or even on the Herald’s sidebar.Keller never wrote the words “Kennedy said by phone as he drove by a wind farm,” or even anything close. The section you are referring to appears on p. 192. It does indeed include quotes from Robert Kennedy Jr. that were taken from a Globe article. It is clear from the context that Keller did not interview Kennedy. We’ve already established that Keller could have handled citations better than he did, but there was no attempt to deceive the reader.We are going round and round in circles now, and I do not have the time to knock down false accusations. I hope that we can now move on. For those of you who can’t get enough, I highly recommend David Bernstein’s post today on the sourcing (and lack thereof) in “Crashing the Gate.” Enjoy.

I checked out Bernstein’s post on Crashing the Gate. As I said in a comment (“appalled”) there, the ONE legitimate example they find is orders of magnitude less serious than what Keller did in at least 30 instances.If that’s the best you and all the other Keller apologists can do, he’s in trouble.