Timothy S. Goeglein, until Friday a White House aide and a key contact to the religious right, may go down in journalism history as the person who plagiarized so much for so little.
At last count, 27 of his guest columns for The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., contained elements - sometimes lots of elements - lifted without acknowledgement from other writers.
Goeglein submitted these columns at his own pace, and the newspaper didn’t pay him.
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In this respect he was different from other serial plagiarists, including Jayson Blair of The New York Times and Stephen Glass of The New Republic, who were on staff when they did their heavy lifting.
Starting as an intern with then Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana, Goeglein went on to work on the George W. Bush 2000 presidential campaign.
After that, he became Bush and Karl Rove’s liaison with conservative Christian leaders.
“Even Mr. Rove has his limits - calls he cannot make, hands he cannot shake and meeting he cannot attend,” wrote the Times in 2004. “For those, he has Timothy Goeglein.”
At the time of his resignation Friday, Goeglein, 44, the special assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, was making a reported $125,000.
In stepping down, Goeglein admitted his plagiarism. “It is true. I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses,” he-mailed the editor of The News-Sentinel.
Goeglein resigned about 12 hours after Nancy Nall Derringer, a former columnist at The News-Sentinel, posted an item on one of his columns in her blog, nancynall.com.
Derringer had been stopped in her tracks by Goeglein’s reference to “a notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in the last century, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey.”
Curious, she Goggled “Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey” and came upon the name in an 1996 essay by Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review. (Later she would learn that both Hart and Goeglein had misspelled the professor’s first name. It’s “Eugen.”)
Derringer read on in Hart’s essay and discovered that Goeglein had taken sentences, even paragraphs, from him with little or no alteration. Half of his column, eight of 16 paragraphs, was copied.
“My, my, my, Tim Goeglein, director of the White House office of public liaison, is a plagiarist,” Derringer wrote. “Not an accidental or delicate one, either.”
Derringer posted at 7:38 a.m. Friday. At 10:24 a.m., a link to her item was posted on Romenesko, a widely read journalism blog.
The News-Sentinel then began a bit of journalistic C.S.I. that has been come familiar since Jayson Blair’s fall at the Times.
The archives were checked, more plagiarism was quickly found. At last count more than half of Goeglein’s columns have problems.
The News-Sentinel has dutifully listed all the damaged goods. A review of this growing list shows that that Goeglein was eclectic, taking from magazines, periodicals and newspapers, in particular the Times and the Post. He liked reviews and opinion pieces in general.
Goeglein cribbed from Hart, now an emeritus professor at Dartmouth, three times. He turned to Jonathan Yardley, the Post’s book critic, at least twice.
It turns out that Goeglein even indirectly plagiarized Pope John Paul II as quoted in a column by Roger Cohen in the International Herald Tribune that also ran in the Times.
Leo Morris, the editorial page editor of The News-Sentinel, said that the paper doesn’t have the manpower to check every guest column.
“If you can’t trust the faith-based assistant to the president, who can you trust?” he added.
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