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Gabor Steingart Mocks Americans in Wall Street Journal Piece

Last year I wrote about how Dow Jones board member Dieter von Holtzbrinck resigned his post in protest of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the venerable Wall Street Journal. Von Holtzbrinck was very much aware of the business practices of Murdoch's News Corporation, and worried that the WSJ's legacy of journalistic excellence would be destroyed:

"I cannot prove that my worries are right. I can only refer to News Corp. business practices in the past." Von Holtzbrinck wrote.

Well, von Holtzbrinck's concerns were very much justified:  since taking over the Wall Street Journal Murdoch has moved swiftly to transform America's premier business newspaper into a neoconservative rag. After firing key editorial staff, Murdoch has replaced coverage of business with right-wing political commentary:

PEJ examined the Journal's front pages from every other weekday edition between Dec. 13, 2007, and March 13, 2008, to determine if the paper’s agenda had changed, the report said.
Among its findings:
• "Business coverage dropped more than half -- falling from 30% in the months prior to the sale to 14%."
• "In the first four months of Murdoch’s ownership, the Journal has shifted its focus, opting for less business coverage and for more coverage of national politics and international issues."

In his effort to beef-up neoconservative commentary, Murdoch has found a kindred soul in Der Spiegel's Washington correspondent Gabor Steingart.  In his first op/ed contribution on May 10, Steingart mocks Americans desire to have universal health care, similar to the programs offered in Germany, France, and every other highly industrialized country:

When I begin to feel homesick for Germany, I have discovered a cheap and easy way out. I simply turn on the TV and listen to a Barack Obama stump speech.

The promised land of universal health care, secure pensions, a lot of green-collar jobs and stable bridges brings me back to my home country. My grandma, who has worked in a post office all her life, enjoys her pension without having ever observed the stock market. Everyone who travels through the countryside can see thousands of windmills, but never a collapsed bridge. And the best: My mom, my friends and everyone around them have access to first-class medical services.

After telling German readers for months that Barack Obama's candidacy was a "fairy tale", now Steingart tells the WSJ's readers that Senator Obama's programs to improve the lives of ordinary Americans are a fairy tale we can't afford.  Of course, he doesn't mention the $1 trillion price tag of the Iraq War debacle which Murdoch so fervently supports (as long as his own sons remain out of it).

Barack Obama is Murdoch's (and Steingart's) worst nightmare: A charismatic black candidate who wants to end torture, withdraw from Iraq, end the tax cuts for the wealthy and make health care accessible to all.  As the campaign progresses, watch for further hit pieces in the Wall Street Journal on Obama. No doubt many will have the byline of Gabor Steingart.

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.