Cheating is cheating

This is a story about cheating, not about whether blogging is journalism. No one likes a cheater. Whether you're a journalist, weblogger, grad student, baseball player, garbage collector -- whatever -- you lose credibility the moment you start cutting corners and using spitballs. When blogger Sean-Paul Kelley, a.k.a. The Agonist, got caught by fellow warblogger General Roy for lifting Stratfor reports on the war without attribution, he was caught cheating, plain and simple.

Freelance reporter Daniel Forbes, who depended on Kelley's rapid-fire site for 20 minutes a day of war news, was astounded that this guy in Texas was getting these stories himself and had extraordinary inside sources. When General Roy leveled his charges of stealing, Forbes fleshed out a story for Wired News, starting a fierce firestorm in the blogosphere, with the Washington Post running a blogging ethics story and the inevitable "Agonist Watch" blog sprouting up overnight.

"What bothered me most wasn't the lack of attribution," Forbes told me. "It was the fabricated sources, saying 'a little birdie told me' or it was from 'a Turkish friend' [when it was from Stratfor]." Kelley, for his part, has apologized publicly and loudly, on his site and to the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Post. His response to the Post's Howard Kurtz is typical: "What I did was inexcusable. It was a dumb thing to do, it really was." When I spoke to him yesterday, Kelley said he learned some lessons, most prominently: cite sources at every turn (which he now does very clearly).

But was his crime plagiarism? Kelley was still in denial yesterday, saying "I don't feel it's plagiarism, and a couple professors who run blogs said what I did was dumb, but not plagiarism -- more of a copyright violation than anything else." Later, Kelley wondered what the uproar was all about, and called his crime a "misdemeanor" no worse than downloading a copyrighted music file from Napster.

A conservative conspiracy?

While the vast majority of news reports, journalism professors and blog postings have been harshly critical of Kelley's unattributed posts, there were murmurs of a pro-war vs. anti-war undercurrent. That is, General Roy was seen as a conservative type attacking the Agonist because he was a liberal that hit the big time. Kelley himself said he didn't want to politicize the debate, but felt certain that Roy was out to get him because he was "the first non-conservative blog that was getting popular." Roy responds that he tries to stay away from political rants, and focuses on military issues from "at least a semi-professional point of view." But there was a tinge of rhetoric when Roy called the Agonist's site "anti-truth."

For his part, Forbes didn't focus on the ideological angle, and simply was impressed that Roy's charges held water. Whatever the motivation of someone uncovering a wrong -- whether it's Woodward and Bernstein or a warblogger -- once they get the goods, motivation is just a sideshow.

But conspiracies are rarely put aside so easily in the world of bloggers. Some wondered why left-leaning bloggers were continuing to link to the Agonist, and one, David Kenner, even believes the lefties aren't as concerned with "blogosphere credibility" as conservatives. These arguments go round and round, with little more than "he said, she said" innuendo as proof of anything.

The aftermath

So what's to come of the Agonist and his comeuppance? Few cheaters regain credibility in the real world, and Kelley says "I will accept the consequences" in his online apology. But you can't help but think he likes the idea of being lauded in The New York Times for his blogging prowess rather than being an anonymous worker at a financial services firm in San Antonio. Though Roy figured the bad publicity would boost traffic to the Agonist, Kelley says the opposite has been the case, as he's lost 40-45% of traffic from his peak of 120,000 hits per day.

Still, Kelley can take solace in the fact that some reporters are either blindly forgiving or ignorant of the scandal. Newsday's Lou Dolinar parroted the earlier praise of the Agonist in a report only yesterday, calling his site "one of the better spots when you're trying to make sense of conflicting media reports." And they say cheaters never prosper.