Uuugghh, this whole thing still saddens me very much…I can say, I totally appreciate your quest for truth and the efforts of Danielle and Becca!

I just can’t understand the failure to attribute. Those breadcrumbs are as crucial to the author to remember where material came from as they are to the stature of the source.
Everybody loses when material is mooched.

Then again, I haven’t gotten any angry e-mails denying it, so . . .
It can’t be understated that persons close to the Breitbart organization (and who were friends with Andrew himself) have approached all of us and encouraged us to continue this project. And as Stacy points out, if anyone wanted to ask us to stop– from either Breitbart or Beck’s camps– they can easily do so. They have not.

Say, I used to know a guy who started doing basically the same thing with content. I think it was Tiny Chartreuse Golfballs or something like that.

The most surprising aspect to me is that Breitbart.com would allow it to devolve into a lawsuit. Perhaps the team will never come close to matching the cultural/media savvy of Breitbart himself. What would they possibly gain at this point?
And if Beck (the org) is as intangled as described so far, it is the less surprising aspect for me. I’ve never been a detractor but I’ve also been at best a like warm bystander of his work. For me there is a tinge too much of the tent revival performer in his style. And his overt efforts to always seem modest just don’t quite convince me. So, to imagine he might try to buy talent away contentiuosly from another ‘competitor’ may not be so far fetched. Many people I’ve worked with in my past have not been overtly highly egotistical, but their actions proved it out. This ‘feels’ like that could be the case.

And you don’t think writers at Breitbart have done the same thing? I know for a fact Mandy Nagy was one of them so she shouldn’t be included in this as a witness because she’s just as guilty.

I’m more concerned about how the people are being treated after putting their butts on the line for the sake of truth and who didn’t make a dime for their efforts. They were put through hell while Dana Loesch seems to be the only one who stuck her head out for them, at least at one point. I liked her when she was like that. I didn’t like her when she became intimidated by what her fellow employees did to people and jumped on the “let’s ignore them” bandwagon once they got what they wanted, the story.

I don’t care if anyone doesn’t like Seth Allen (I don’t care for his political views either) but he did expose the Kimberlin criminal first, not Mandy Nagy. And she threw him under the bus just as bad as she did to Mike Stack and others. But she’s got the nerve to sit there and cry about a chart? If the public only knew the whole story behind that one.

But, we won’t talk about that because it’s all about the clique and Lee Stranahan raving about how Mandy Nagy is a hero while hanging the very conservatives out to dry that he steals their life-stories from to make a buck.

This article is lacking some serious truth.

Oh, the Beck, babe, has such tweeps, dear
And he fools them all the time
Just a chalkboard has old MacBeck, babe
And he keeps it always in sight…

By being gracious and attributing, Beck loses nothing and gains allies in the trenches.

Recovered alcoholics tend to have that tent revival vibe.

is he a former?

Actually, I am looking forward to the day when I write/post something that someone deems good enough to filch.

You always have filchable content …

Rush likes to promote conservative bloggers. Which is cool. And let’s not forget Limbaugh and Buckley were good friends and Buckley acted like a father/spiritual advisor (if you will) to Rush.

Except most of his content is crap.

As much as I admired Andrew Breitbart, this statement by him was absolutely not true:

“…he (Beck) lied to his audience on television that he didn’t do the Sherrod story…”
I was watching Beck the day Breitbart broke the Sherrod story; Beck didn’t mention it AT ALL. He didn’t touch that story. It was only the next day — after Sherrod had been fired and Breitbart was hung out to dry for hyping a “racist” story taken out of context — that Beck even started to talk about Sherrod.
Like everyone else, even Breitbart had his flaws. His selective memory was one of them…

It wasn’t at the time he started stealing it.

Me too, Will.

Wotta revoltin’ development.

The overall originality problem is often made ridiculously complex by parties involved. Of course, the problem exists all throughout the world of creativity, not just among journalists. It’s even hard to pin down who coined the phrase about “good ones borrow, great ones steal,” and Steve Jobs and Milton Berle were both known to be celebrated, unrepentant “stealers” of stuff (to name only two from among many).

For some reason, only in the world of print is plagiarism deemed a firing offense (or possibly a reason to be given a Pulitzer, depending upon the owner of the rag in question, and the number of sycophants in one’s retinue). For the rest of the world of creative endeavor, plagiarism or copying is merely a brand-damaging act.

If you’re caught.

We can easily understand someone’s anger when the work they’ve done is co-opted by another. But few understand how to deal with the situation—or the anger—well. For example, Debbie Schlussel became a raving nutjob over the fact that Sean Hannity evidently used some of her research without attribution. We also have folks like Michael Fakename-Savage, who cry crocodile tears at those who steal from him while he obviously, and clumsily steals from others.

The fact is, content theft is the shark in the waters of creativity. And while people rightly fear sharks, the oceans would be horrible places without them. Predators are part of the ecosystem, and sometimes you have to fight them directly to survive (the Loesch lawsuit, for example, showing, BTW, that this rant is on-topic). But sometimes you simply do what it takes to survive, despite their presence.

Thus all the usual, cliched tricks become necessary in the high-stakes game of, “my career in the creative arts:”

Play your cards close to the vest (keep your secrets).

Keep a sharp eye out (intel is your friend).

Always carry a backup gun (#Metaphor).

Develop good marketing (like surfing: sometimes you catch a wave, sometimes you have to do the hard work of paddling into and through them to get ready to catch another).

Hire a shark for a salesman (or an attorney, or both).

Put up with some lowlives (like those of us here, in the comment section) in order to deal with even worse lowlives (#OWS, #JournoList, #BackBenchers).

Out-produce the competition (Otherwise known as Production Is The Solution To The Problem Of Survival)

I could go on, but someone will probably just copy it and take credit. But hey, we’re all friends here. Besides, I just used a quote without attribution. Sue me.

As to Beck, his huckster vibe is bad enough. But his need to be at the front of his own movement (like say, a certain magazine where the owner’s face appears on every cover) is kind of embarrassing to watch. The recovering alcoholic bit adds to it, in noticeable measure, but I guess, good for him. He ain’t drinking.

Beck frequently likes to refer to the words on a sign on Reagan’s desk that said “There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” However, he clearly does seem to care who gets the credit. Otherwise he’d employ a simple solution: It would only take a webpage for each show, which could be cranked out in a few minutes by a staffer using notepad.

You’re welcome, Glenn.

The internets: I can quit anytime.

I left out of that rant an important element: not all stealing is “stealing stealing” (thank you, Whoopie Goldberg). If it were, you could never honorably use a “classic, Pink-Floyd-style Fender-Rhodes keyboard sound” in one of your songs. Obviously that style gets used a ton.

Funnily enough, if you use, say a sound from a famous, sample-based duo (like say, Chemical Brothers) in one of your songs, that’s considered déclassé. But B3 organ?, Fender-Rhodes?, “oh, that’s different.”

And some bands have been decried on radio and in fannish magazines for using the standard, 12-bar blues pattern in their songs. “Hey, man, all their songs sound alike, what a ripoff!”

If such “stealing” were forbidden, some art forms—like the blues—could never exist.

(Yes, I know, some of you would cheer, but still)

Well put.

Another perspective:

When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ‘eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ‘e might require,
‘E went an’ took — the same as me!

The market-girls an’ fishermen,
The shepherds an’ the sailors, too,
They ‘eard old songs turn up again,
But kep’ it quiet — same as you!

They knew ‘e stole; ‘e knew they knowed.
They didn’t tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at ‘Omer down the road,
An’ ‘e winked back — the same as us!