The AP Pulls a 180 on an Article Defending Harvard's Serial-Plagiarist President After Getting Dragged on X/Twitter

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I need to come right out and admit my personal shame that I went to community college, followed by a state school. And while spending what is supposed to be the best four years of a young person's life - exploring the wonders of substance abuse and casual, commitment-free sex with no consequences - living at my mom's house, commuting back and forth to campus, working part time jobs and hanging around with my high school friends, I learned one valuable lesson that has stuck with me ever since. And it was this:

People who go off to real universities are my superiors. And those who go to elite schools like the Ivys are even better still. They're smarter. More articulate. More respectable. Better suited in every way to using their intellectual gifts to find success and shape the world than we commuter school chumps. 

More importantly, Ivy Leaguers possess a quality few humans get to experience. And that is the power to impress people. Merely by identifying with their school, they make people want to hire them, marry them, be friends with them, welcome them into their clubs, and defend them, even when they've been caught committing serious wrongdoing. They're Nietzsche's Superman, living in an environment free from the consequence of their actions. Take for example, former Harvard President Claudine Gay:

In the normal course of things, you'd assume we were witnessing an open-and-shut case of academic fraud. No less than 50 incidents of plagiarism found in only a handful of published works. And the exact kind of intellectual dishonesty that cost 27 student their Harvard enrollments last year alone. Therefore the most unambiguous example of a university president deserving of a good removal from the job. 

But not in 2024. Not in this environment. And not in today's media environment. This is the way the issue was framed by the Associated Press. And the community notes that followed:

Proving once again that this country is so splintered, we can get into a bench-clearing brawl over literally any news story:

And defend anything done by anybody, no matter how indefensible, so long as that thing and that body seems to be on our side of the cultural divide. Even the AP, which not that long ago seemed like the last bastion you could go to that simply told you what was going on in the world. Without bias. Agenda-free. With no slant. Just gave you the facts to do with as you will, like a grownup. Now telling you that the real story of Claudine Gay is a tragic one, with her as the victim. An innocent brought down by a new, sinister Weapon of Class Destruction: Holding people accountable when they rip off the work, words, and research of others. 

But this time, the AP got way too far out over their skis. To the point it was so obvious they were trying to run interference for an academic fraud that they got ratio'ed into the Kuiper Belt and had to walk it all back:

Source - The Associated Press updated a headline on Wednesday that deemed plagiarism a "new conservative weapon," following widespread backlash to the post on X. …

"The story doesn’t meet our standards," Lauren Easton, the VP of AP Corporate Communications, told Fox News Digital. She said they were in the process of updating the headline.

The AP's original headline read, "Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism," which was widely mocked on social media, after Harvard President Claudine Gay announced she would be resigning from the position on Tuesday. 

"Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage," the AP's new headline reads.

Personally, I would've preferred "Plagiarism downed Harvard's president," given the irrefutable proof she helped herself to long passages of other people's writing without attribution. Which is not a "charge," it's plagiarism. But I won't pick nits. Instead, I'll just admire the awesome power that comes from being head of a major university. There's so much prestige to that job that even legendary news outlets willingly humiliate themselves for your benefit. If I was Professor Gay, still on staff pulling in $900K a year to teach one Political Science seminar, I'd be more proud of that accomplishment than anything else I've done. 

Elvis might have been completely drug-addled at this point and mailing in every performance. But you have to admit he was right: