Did WND’s Jerome Corsi Plagiarize the London Evening Standard and the AFP?
Several months back I illustrated how Brad O’Leary, in his WND-published book The Audacity of Deceit, heavily copied an article by another WorldNetDaily writer. Another blog noted last month where a column by WND head Joseph Farah bore a suspicious resemblance to a Wikipedia article.
But neither of those hold a candle to a December 19 WND article by Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation and Where’s the Birth Certificate? The article is “Obama’s legacy of broken promises - in Kenya”. Not only is roughly half of Corsi’s article lifted from a 2008 British news story, but Corsi goes further, and repeatedly claims that the copied information and quotations were instead obtained by unnamed “WND researchers” in Kenya.
The British article in question is “Barack Obama’s broken promise to African village”, written by David Cohen and published in the London Evening Standard on July 25, 2008. Corsi even links to Cohen’s story in his article (proving that he personally read the article he copied, and the content was not just provided to him by an unscrupulous “source”), but credits it as the source of only three sentences of information.
Meanwhile, he claims the rest of the article is the result of “a report in Kenya commissioned by WND.” Corsi writes:
“A former Kenyan Parliament member with whom WND has worked confidentially since 2008 compiled the report. The research was assigned to trusted Kenyan professionals who conducted the field work and reported their findings in writing.”
This is not the only specific reference in Corsi’s article to WND researchers. On several occasions, he provides quotes and statements that he claims were provided to WND researchers. But a review of the Evening Standard shows that Corsi simply lifted them, verbatim, from the 2008 story…