Wired news - 02:00 AM Apr. 07, 2003 PT
Like any number of webloggers trying to make their mark with commentary on the war in Iraq, Sean-Paul Kelley knew geography and career experience didn't favor him.
Kelley -- the man behind the wildly popular site The Agonist -- lives in Texas, worlds away from the war's front lines. And his reporting résumé added up to a mere three weeks at a local paper. Still, for the last few weeks, he had managed to post several dozen war-related news items a day on his site.
Some of the information was attributed to news outlets and other sources, but much of it was unsourced, particularly the almost real-time combat information presumably gleaned from a string of high-level sources worldwide.
Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek online and National Public Radio.
The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
"You got me, I admit it.... I made a mistake," Kelley said. "It was stupid."
In a series of interviews with Wired News, Kelley changed his story several times. At first, he said he used just four or five Stratfor items a day without crediting the company. Later, he owned up to "six or seven days when half was from Stratfor."
Aside from a few scattered attributions, Kelley presented Stratfor's intelligence as information he had uncovered himself, typically paragraph-long reports detailing combat operations in Iraq. He took these wholesale from a Stratfor proprietary newsletter, U.S.-Iraqwar.com, which Kelley admits he subscribes to.
"Many postings on the (Agonist) pages I looked at are word-for-word verbatim," said Stratfor chief analyst Matthew Baker.
Kelley's plagiarism was first brought to light by a blogger who goes by the name General Roy. Last week, on his pro-war site, Strategic Armchair Command, Roy charged Kelley with nearly a dozen instances of plagiarizing Stratfor material over the course of a single day.
Roy says he noticed the plagiarism on March 31 when, because of technical difficulties on its website, Stratfor e-mailed its reports in bulk. The reports' same-day replication on The Agonist leaped off Roy's screen.
Roy maintains he wasn't gunning for Kelley, whose traffic dwarfs Strategic Armchair Command's 3,000 daily page views. Roy says he finds plagiarism intolerable and wanted to "let the blogosphere decide."
Roy said Stratfor included the following item in its March 31 dispatch: "U.S. troops fired on a car that reportedly had tried to crash through a checkpoint near As Samawah. One man was killed and three people were wounded. U.S. officials say the man who was killed was an Iraqi soldier."
Forty minutes later, Roy said, The Agonist posted the bulletin word-for-word.
Later that day, The Agonist reported a number of specifics about the capture of the An Najaf airfield. Kelley provided key details about which military divisions spearheaded the action, and which directions they came from. Aside from substituting the word "seized" for "captured" -- and dropping a couple of words like "in" and "and" -- it came verbatim from Stratfor, Roy said.
Perhaps commendably, Kelley's initial response to Roy's plagiarism charge was to link to the accusation on the Armchair Command blog and repost an item from March 21 with a note saying that some of his material was "copied and pasted" and some was not. "I really do wish I could cite all the sources here ... please understand the time constraints I am under," Kelley wrote.
But in addition to failing to name Stratfor as the rightful source of the information, it appears that in at least two instances Kelley also tried to pass it off as intelligence provided by his own unnamed sources. On March 20, at the war's outset, he wrote that "a little birdie told me" about certain information. In another case, his source was "a Turkish friend."
After Roy posted the plagiarism accusation against Kelley, Dan Petty -- a Stratfor newsletter subscriber and undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Champaign -- told Roy about Kelley's false source attribution.
According to Petty, Kelley posted an item reporting that "an estimated 2,000 U.S. forces (had arrived) in the border town of Silopi, Turkey, according to a Turkish friend in an Iraqi border town." After Roy levied the plagiarism charges, however, Kelley apparently changed the source of that report to Stratfor.
When asked about the original posting that credited a Turkish friend, Kelley said, "That never appeared on my site." Later he said, "I don't recall writing it."
Kelley offered an even more dubious explanation for the item attributed to a "little birdie." When asked how Stratfor information came to be credited to an unnamed source, Kelley said one of his sources must have gotten it from Stratfor and passed it on to him without crediting the intelligence company.
On Thursday, a March 20 update included the following: "But a little birdie told me that the current intermittent attacks against Iraq are designed to provoke a much-desired coup, flush out Iraqi command personnel and give covert forces on the ground an opportunity to strike." The item ended with a denigration of the media and a request for tips from readers.
In an interview, Kelley supplied the unnamed source's phone number, evidently hoping he would claim responsibility for providing the Stratfor material, which was not initially credited to the intelligence firm.
"I don't even read Stratfor," said the source, who described himself as a "former member of the intelligence community." When asked if he had ever copied a Stratfor item and sent it to Kelley, the source said, "I don't think that's something you could posit."
On Friday, the "little birdie" item was appended with a bolded parenthetical note: "The little birdie that gave me this information was Stratfor.com."
The Net remains a battleground for copyright protection, said Stratfor's Baker, but he was surprised and offended by the volume of Stratfor material Kelly tried to pass off as his own. "There is the trade-off of spreading our name, of publicity for Stratfor," Baker added.
"I'm glad someone considers our information of such value as to create a reputation in the marketplace," said Stratfor Vice President Aaric Eisenstein. "But it should accrue to the people actually doing the work: Stratfor's staff and sources."
Indeed, Kelley wrote on March 5, "Stratfor's breadth of coverage far surpasses any of the other affordable services of its kind," adding that Stratfor "tries to stay ahead of the media."
In a surprisingly amicable resolution, Stratfor and Kelley have agreed that he can use no more than two Stratfor items per day, and always with attribution.
With a staff of dozens of analysts, Stratfor has 150,000 subscribers to products that cost from $50 a year for U.S.-Iraqwar.com to more than $600 annually, according to Eisenstein. Kelley said he subscribes to the full package.
So why did Kelley do it?
"I was trying to develop my own sources," he said. "If I could throw stuff out there to get some eyebrows raised as to 'who is this guy?' then I might get sent some encrypted e-mail." He was referring to the hope that high-level government and military sources might anonymously share information he could post on The Agonist.
Should Kelley sustain much criticism from the episode, it'll be a dramatic comedown from his recent media acclaim.
On March 25, The New York Times, for instance, referred to Kelley as "the mastermind and lightning-fast typist" behind The Agonist. It quoted Kelley's assertion that his 350 percent increase in readership over the prior five days was "a function of the fact that I am providing the news without the media hype of CNN and Fox."
Such success was built, in part, on plagiarizing Stratfor's extensive war-theater reporting. Referring to Kelley's blog, Petty said, "I got the feeling almost half of it was from Stratfor, and the rest almost seemed like filler -- it was not super compelling."
Judging by his March 31 appearance on NPR's The Connection, Kelley is an articulate media presence. On air, he cited his obligation to the readers who flock to his site "based on my reporting and my integrity." Asked about his editorial judgment, he referred to his graduate studies in international relations and said, "I feel I have a good sense of what's real and what's not."
But proof that Kelley's reputation was not altogether deserved could hurt bloggers' attempts to scratch their way to mainstream credibility.
"If blogging wants to take itself seriously as journalism, then the rules of journalism apply: Don't plagiarize," said Columbia University Journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan.
"I really thought that The Agonist was going to be the vanguard that pushed news blogging over the top and gave many of us new hope," opined a MetaFilter poster named Dean Paxton. "Instead, I fear that this is an enormous setback. Especially when the blog-savvy media pundits are turned on to this."
Rafe Colburn, who runs the blog rc3.org, praised Kelley's site as well-done. "But I honestly have no idea how good it is because I don't know how much of his stuff is taken from other sites and posted without attribution. Unfortunately, I can no longer recommend his site to my readers."
In an ironic March 26 blog entry, Kelley addressed the creators of a Russian-based war blog: "To the ... guys who are backdating stuff from my site: Do your own research! Knock it off!"