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: Lawbeat

Did Gellman shamelessly recycle Cheney material?

By Mark Obbie

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Was I too quick to see fresh insight in Barton Gellman's excerpts from his Dick Cheney expose Angler, published Sunday in The Washington Post (and followed up with part two yesterday)? Yes, according to a review today in the Times by Michiko Kakutani, who all but accuses Gellman of a clip job -- one bordering on story-theft:

“Angler” grew out of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of the same title that Mr. Gellman and Jo Becker (now of The New York Times) reported for The Washington Post in 2007, and this book remains heavily indebted to those articles. For that matter, this volume builds upon the pioneering work of many other reporters (most notably, Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times, and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post), whom Mr. Gellman mentions only glancingly, if at all, or in cursory notes at the end of the volume.

Harsh! I don't pretend to know the truth because that would require actual time and hard work on my part, which is in short supply right now while I focus on my day job. But it sure is fun to watch the fireworks set off by a hard-nosed book of investigative reporting -- particularly when the criticism comes from somewhere other than the usual partisans.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on September 16, 2008 (boomark / email).