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: Lawbeat

Toobin on Stone and Spitzer: No there there

By Mark Obbie

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Jeff Toobin's recent piece on Roger Stone drew a sideswipe from Kathleen Parker, at National Review Online's "The Corner." She couldn't come right out and accuse Toobin of plagiarism, but she crows about noticing similarities between his New Yorker profile of the Republican prankster/hitman and this piece last November in The Weekly Standard by Matt Labash. Parker writes:

The similarities are striking, the most egregious of which is a device Labash uses throughout his piece. He repeatedly breaks up anecdotes with “Stone’s Rules” — things like “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack,” as well as “White shirt + tan face = confidence.” Toobin does the exact same thing throughout his profile, even including the same mathematical equation and, like Labash, basing his conclusion on yet another rule.

Read the articles side by side, and you'll come away shaking your head at the notion that Toobin, whose reporting work in his piece is evident, even found inspiration, much less literary devices to steal, in Labash's (not that Labash's piece is garbage -- it's actually quite good; it's just different). As Gawker's Hamilton Nolan put it, Parker has a point only "if you consider it plagiarism to quote the well-rehearsed quotes of a veteran quote whore."The more interesting question is whether Toobin hung his story on too flimsy a news hook. He draws us in with the revelation that Stone will explain "the role he may have played in the fall of Eliot Spitzer." Did he in fact play a role? Only late in the article do we learn that the early rumor that Stone picked up about Spitzer's ways with the ladies was eventually passed along to the FBI, which won't comment. But, as Toobin himself concedes (all too briefly), there's ample proof that the FBI didn't need Stone's tip to follow a money trail straight to the prostitution scandal. So even if it happened as Stone says, it didn't matter. I finished the piece wondering why I'd let myself get suckered in (but partly glad, because it's a predictably colorful and tawdry read).

Full post as published by Lawbeat on June 05, 2008 (boomark / email).