Back in 2024 I published an article headlined “Why Is The Same Misleading Language About Youth Gender Medicine Copied And Pasted Into Dozens Of CNN.com Articles?” The sentence in question was “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender — the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender — the gender by which one wants to be known.”
As I wrote:
But of course, whether youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based is exactly the thing being debated, and anyone who has been following this debate closely knows that every national health system that has examined this question closely, including the NHS, has come to the same conclusion: the evidence is paltry. That’s why so many countries, including Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway, have significantly scaled back access to these treatments for youth. So it’s very strange to see this sentence, which reads as though it comes from an activist press release, published in a news article in CNN, an outlet that generally adheres to the old-school divide between news and opinion. [footnote omitted]
That article included a list of 35 instances in which that sentence, or very close variants of it, had appeared in CNN.com articles between May 2022 and March 2024. I reached out to CNN but the network gave me no substantive comment — someone there told me on background that it’s standard for outlets to provide reporters with guidance about the appropriate language to use, but this didn’t seem like a credible explanation. Sure, outlets have style guides when it comes to “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant,” or “biological sex” versus “sex assigned at birth,” but come on — this was clearly different:
You do not generally see the same complex sentence pasted over and over and over into news stories written by different authors and published in different sections. I asked CNN if it could provide me any other examples of CNN.com publishing the same sentence in multiple stories by different authors, and posed the same question in an email to Virginia Moseley, the CNN executive editor who, according to the website, “oversee[s] international and domestic news operations across platforms.” I didn’t hear back about this.
One thing I didn’t do when I published that first piece, but which I should have done, was confidently lock down the very first instance of this sentence appearing on CNN. Last week I finally did, and. . . this looks really bad for CNN. Whether or not you want to call it “plagiarism” will probably depend on how charitable you’re feeling, but either way it reflects genuinely sloppy editorial practices. It’s also a cringeworthy example of how mainstream media outlets have let themselves be steamrolled by activists on this issue.
You, Free Subscriber or Esteemed Visitor From Elsewhere (EVFE), are about to hit the paywall. But now’s a really good time to upgrade that membership, not only because what follows is some spectacular rock-solid arguably pretty decent media criticism, but also because, as I mentioned a couple days ago, anyone who is a paying subscriber this coming Friday, September 4th will get two free months added to their subscription. You’ll basically be making money!*
*though not in any literal or otherwise meaningful sense.