Wash Times Casts Paul Adrift Over Plagiarized Column

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The Washington Times is discontinuing Sen. Rand Paul's (R.-Ky.) weekly column after BuzzFeed reported that his Sept. 20  Times column lifted passages from a Dan Stewart article in The Week without attribution, the Gawker.com Web site reports.

The Times' decision to end the column that Paul began writing last summer is the sour cherry atop a melted sundae of a week for the 50-year-old Republican and Tea Party fave who was elected to the Senate in 2010. Last week, Politico and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC alleged that speeches given by Paul have plagiarized a variety of sources, including Associated Press articles and Wikipedia pages for the films Stand and Deliver and Gattaca, Additionally, BuzzFeed claims Paul's book, Government Bullies, cribbed from a 2003 Heritage Foundation study without attribution.

Confronted with these embarrassing missteps, Sen. Paul stepped up to the plate and blamed his staff. Still, it seems as if Paul, an opthalmologist, doctors his written work as well.

BuzzFeed Adds Investigative Unit to Growing Editorial Team

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Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Mark Schoofs will helm an investigative unit of six reporters hired by BuzzFeed, the social media Web site that editorially tracks viral content, The New York Times reported today.

Schoofs, who garnered the award while at the Wall St. Journal for a series of articles on AIDS in Africa, most recently worked for the nonprofit ProPublica. BuzzFeed upped its editorial workforce to 134, having recently hired an equal number of journalists to report on foreign affairs (see "TUOL" post 5/6/13).

Thomson Reuters Twitter Feed Hacked by Pro-Assad Group

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Hacking is the great equalizer for "armies" that might not fare so well on the battlefield, as financial data and news giant Thomson Reuters learned yesterday.

The Web site Allthingsd.com reported that the Syrian Electronic Army ("SEA"), which backs President Bashar al-Assad in the Middle East nation's bloody, nearly two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, briefly co-opted @ThomsonReuters to spew seven tweet links to images that included pro-Assad cartoons that BuzzFeed captured.

The Thomson Reuters account was temporarily suspended until the company regained control of it. The SEA last April and May took credit for hacking into Twitter accounts of CBS, The Guardian and Financial Times, according to the Allthingsd article.

Turns out you can't believe everything you read in social media world, a shocking revelation to no one.

BuzzFeed Foreign Matters

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BuzzFeed, the social media Web site that editorially tracks viral content, plans to expand foreign news coverage by adding an editor and a half-dozen reporters, the New York Times reported today.

BuzzFeed Editor Ben Smith said users' reliance on the platform during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage helped prompt the decision to expand its presence in Washington, D.C. and into Cairo and Mexico. BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti also co-founded The Huffington Post, which also has expanded foreign news coverage with bureaus in Canada and Europe and will also unveil an edition in Japan this year, according to the Times article.

Malaysia to Bloggers: If We Want Your Opinion, We'll Pay You for It

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In an appalling smear-for-hire campaign, 10 online media columnists were paid by the Malaysian government to trash opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on various U.S. media Web sites, according to a BuzzFeed story reported by paidContent.org.

Allegedly, former Guardian opinion columnist Joshua Trevino, whom the daily jettisoned last year over conflict of interest concerns, served as the Malaysian government's conduit, facilitating payments ranging from $2,000 to $36,000 to the 10 columnists, who, in turn, wrote about Malaysia. Trevino, himself, garnered more than $389,000 from Malaysia, according to the paidContent account of the BuzzFeed scoop. Ibrahim is enmeshed in a sodomy trial that human rights advocates have decried as politically motivated.

Among the beneficiaries of the Southeast Asian nation's largesse were conservative columnists for The National Review, Huffington Post and Red State. HuffPo pulled the offending posts after the BuzzFeed story broke, citing a conflict of interest breach, but "TUOL"'s Facetiousnes Editor suspects HuffPo just objects to its contributors being paid for their efforts, however ignoble.

The paidContent article blames online journalism sites' voracious need for content for making it so easy for Malaysia to manipulate the media for its own purposes. Strange times, indeed, when BuzzFeed, best-known for publishing cat photos ad nauseum, does solid investigative reporting at the same time Watergate legend, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, arrogantly displays his increasing irrelevance, imploding on the Sunday talk-show circuit as a darling of the right-wing lambasting his treatment by Obama Administration officials.