Does Der Spiegel plagiarize?

I've written about Der Spiegel's Washington correspondent Gabor Steingart and his crusade against Barack Obama.  On Wednesday Steingart continued his assault on Senator Obama, comparing his campaign to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.  Steingart knows nothing about America beyond the Beltway; he derives his knowledge of US politics from lunches with his neocon pals.  But at least he doesn't plagiarize his pieces (as far as I can tell).  He's nearly always wrong in his analysis, but at least his mistakes are his own.

Not so for his protégé Gregor Peter Schmitz.  A reader referred me to this post on BLOGBAR where blogger DonAlphonso discovered that a recent piece of "reporting" by Schmitz was in fact a verbatim translation of a Washigton Post story. Here is just one of the passages that DonAlphonso highlights:

Schmitz writes: "Washington - Im Januar 2007 spazierte Barack Obama vom Senat in Washington drei Blöcke weiter zu einem unauffälligen Bürogebäude. Ein paar Tage vorher hatte er dort ein paar Räume angemietet, die waren noch leer bis auf einige Plastikmöbel. Der Senator zog einen Klappstuhl heran, war in der “Washington Post” zu lesen, und setzte sich Julianna Smoot gegenüber - der erfolgreichen Spendensammlerin, die er angeheuert hatte, um die nötigen Millionen für seine Bewerbung um das Weiße Haus einzutreiben. Smoot blätterte durch die dünne Liste an Spendern, die Obama bislang zusammengetragen hatte."

And here is the Washington Post piece: "On a frigid day in early January, Barack Obama rode the three blocks from the Capitol to a nondescript, four-story, white-brick building where he had rented a spartan office suite. Obama pulled out a folding chair and sat down with Julianna Smoot, the veteran Democratic fundraiser he had hired to raise the millions of dollars he would need for a presidential bid. Smoot thumbed through a thin list of potential donors that Obama had gathered during his 2004 Senate bid in Illinois and as he helped other politicians raise money for elections in 2006."

No quotation marks from Schmitz, a lame reference to the Washington Post, but otherwise the entire piece is a word-for-word translation into German.  Now some bloggers are going back to review all of Schmitz's reports from Washington.

I would even go back further.  Gregor Peter Schmitz did some graduate studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  I taught at Harvard and know of the very strict rules concerning plagiarism: it is grounds for immediate expulsion from the university.  Did this behavior pattern also apply to Schmitz's scholarly activities at Harvard?

But the biggest question is:  what kind of editorial controls are there at Der Spiegel?  Few, if any, it would seem.

Comments

[smokeonit]

especially the online version of "der Spiegel", called SPON, spiegel.de, has had a lot of problems with plagiarism and even spelling... humiliating...