Serial plagiarist Tanveer Ahmed looks like he’s been at it again, this time in The Spectator Australia. Ahmed, a psychiatrist, was dropped as a Fairfax columnist after the ABC’s Media Watch exposed multiple examples of plagiarism in 2012, and two years later was dropped from The Australian when it was revealed two paragraphs of a controversial piece about domestic violence had been copied from elsewhere.
But he hasn’t stopped writing or commentating, describing himself on Twitter as a contributor to Weekend Sunrise, Sky News and The Spectator.
And in the July 15 Australian edition of the latter, there are some parts of his piece on the “transgender movement” and identity politics that have distinct echoes of someone else’s work.
Where Ahmed says:
Carl Elliott’s December 2000 piece in The Atlantic says:
And where Ahmed says:
Elliott writes:
The Spectator piece also rewrites a description of a BBC documentary, a University of Toronto study and echoes references to historical schools of medical thought from The Atlantic piece.
Crikey asked Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean and Ahmed for comment, but they did not respond before deadline.
After Ahmed was caught out in 2012, he wrote a mea culpa for The Australian and spoke with ABC Radio National’s Richard Aedy on his Media Report program:
“I think it was literally a case of suddenly putting my research together, collating it through cut and paste and then having it all … having sort of two pages there, around which I’d write. And then often I’d still be attributing most of the time. It was literally this case that begun partly as complacency, partly with a straight out copy and paste and I think it was this … there was still a moral dimension.”
In his piece for the Oz, Ahmed said his plagiarism in The Sydney Morning Herald had been bred of a desire for greater efficiency after collating his research using cut and paste:
“It remained occasional, like a footballer fumbling the ball more often, but working in isolation I had no reason to doubt my performance. When the full extent of my plagiarism was laid bare, even I was shocked. How could it have come to this, entire paragraphs lifted word for word? … The seriousness of my transgression was suddenly much clearer. I was like an addict forced to look in the mirror and survey the wreckage, measured in reputational damage and a rising media career cut short prematurely.”
Ahmed then worked for The Australian as a columnist before he was, again, caught out by blogger Ketan Joshi lifting his work from other people again in 2014. The Australian cut his column.
The Spectator column was still online this morning, but an author’s note that had apparently been added to the online article after the similarities were pointed out has now been removed. The note did not appear in the print edition.
Well spotted Emily. Could there be a lower sump that The Spectator Australia in which to die?
Spectator Editor Rowan Dean. What a joke.
It says alot about The Oz that they took him on after he was caught out at the SMH. Perhaps the extra amount The Oz pays its columnists is compensation for a drop in integrity.
It should not be forgotten that Crikey employed him for at least two, possibly three articles long after he was exposed and given a second chance at SMH only to do it again.
However, Crikey deleted several comments from myself and others pointing out that he was a serial plagairist.
He even begged for forgiveness in his 2nd Crikey article and promised not to do it again.
Just doesn’t want to change, I guess.
BTW, that comparison of transexuals with wannabe amputees is also word for word being touted on some of the nastier alt.right sites – maybe he got the verbiage from there and hoping that decent folk wouldn’t know its origins.
I knew him as a student and a psychiatrist: he had similar problems in professional practice, though that doesn’t make him unique in the private psychiatry sphere.