Roadkill Blog

The Agony of the Agonist

July 4, 2004 - Update -- Sean-Paul has converted his blog to scoop, and in light of that fact, I've rejoined his efforts at publishing the news as a regular user. Scoop makes a one-man blog into a collaborative publishing effort, and that's really all I wanted to see. As far as I'm concerned, this incident is forgetten. -- Bill

This is a bit of a sad story, about an amateur journalist who was tempted by the sweet seductress of popularity, and fell from the path of honest reporting. This story is about a blogger who calls himself the Agonist. The Agonist has become quite popular during this war on Iraq, for reasons, it's said, which include his objectivity and insight. He's recently been interviewed on several major news networks as well, including CNN and NPR. But the thing that really made the Agonist popular was his timeliness, and the depth of information and sources which he seemed to possess. Just a week ago, his blog was recording a million fp hits per day - an astonishing number for a one-man warblog.

What's his secret? Well, during a recent Wired interview it became clear that the Agonist has been plagiarizing the Stratfor Reports, a subscription-based, independent global strategic intelligence service. But there's more to this story than a few uncredited citations, folks.

The Wired interview went pretty hard on Sean-Paul Kelley, aka The Agonist. They accuse him of taking up to 50% of his content during the last few weeks directly from Stratfor. Sean-Paul admits to most of thier accusations, and says, "It was stupid." Now, for many of Sean-Paul's readers, that's the end of the story. He's much admired and appreciated for his hard work and "insightful" reporting during the last three weeks, and before the war as well. But I'm afraid I must point out that it's not the end of the story, nor does plagiarism completely describe the situation which Sean-Paul created for himself.

It turns out that Sean-Paul was rather deeply caught up in his own popularity, in fact. So much so that he was willing to lie directly to me, in order to keep up his fascade.

See, I was recently the victim of a "yanked" Stratfor report. On March 30, I found a report on the Stratfor website which stated that two US servicemen had refused to fight Iraqi civilians, and were sent home to face court-martial. I was, in a word, astonished by the fact that Stratfor had published this report, and reported about it in my k5 diary, where it was quickly pointed out that the report was no longer available on Stratfor. Less than two hours after reporting the incident, Stratfor yanked the report.

I quickly sent Stratfor a quizzical email, which included a screenshot of my web-browser showing the report in question, visible on their front page. To date, I have not received any reply from them. Eventually, I also made a personal blog entry about the incident, which provides the screenshot and some additional information, including the body of my mail to Stratfor. But before I did that, I dropped a line over to the Agonist about my experience, sending him a copy of my email to Stratfor, and the screenshot. Sean-Paul replied quickly, and seemed quite interested in my story.

Sean-Paul and I had several exchanges regarding the yanked Stratfor report, and I came away feeling hopeful of getting a straight answer through him. Sean-Paul claimed that, while he wasn't an actual subscriber to any of Stratfors services, he did, "know a couple of people over there", and that he was "looking into it". He even seemed to try to reassure me, that he trusted my account of the report, when he replied to a question I sent him regarding Stratfor's actions, saying, "I think they got a phone call. Dr. Freidman is very connected." (Dr. Freidman is presumably someone in charge at the Stratfor company) Finally, I felt like someone with some "pull" was going to help me find out if US servicemen were becoming conscientious objectors on the eve of the battle in Iraq.

Well, as you can see from reading the Wired interview linked above, Sean-Paul is, in fact, a Stratfor subscriber. So his claim that he was not a Stratfor subscriber was his first lie to me. Additionally, I now strongly suspect that Sean-Paul doesn't know anyone at Stratfor personally, or even casually. Generally speaking, I guess I'd have to put the entire exchange between the Agonist and myself down as an encounter with a dreamer. When I asked him if there had been any word from Stratfor a few days later, in any case, he replied that, "Mums the word".

Since the Wired interview, Sean-Paul has sent me a personal apology for lying to me. He even invited me to call him collect, but I live a long way from my beloved Texas now, and a collect call would have cost him dearly. I should also say that I was initially impressed with Sean-Paul and his blog - his responses and actions convinced me in the beginning that he cares about the truth. The discussion and concern that I read and perceive from other visitors to his blog also convinced me that I was not alone in my admiration. Sadly, the Agonist wasn't satisfied with the popularity and hit-counts which the uncredited "tidbits" from Stratfor earned him. His lust for "Internet Glory" went deeper than that. I submit to you that the Agonist fell so deeply into the fantasy of being the Well-Connected Blog of Preference, that he started believing it himself - and he was willing to lie, and not just plagiarize, to keep his fantasy alive.

I think most would agree that's a high price to pay for fame, but the issues here run deeper than that. I submit to you that it's well nigh on impossible to make a one-man blog into a fair and unbiased source, and I suspect that many of the Agonist's readers now may agree with me. The very nature of a one-man blog is that it represents an opinion. I suggest that the Agonist recognize this fact, and stop perpetuating a farce. Everybody wants to have the scoop, but without some kind of review or collaboration it's far too easy to stretch the truth - and when one reports the news about the war to a million visitors per day, there's surely an additional responsibility attached.

Posted by Bill Middleton at April 9, 2003 02:13 AM | TrackBack