Plagiarism Expert: “If I Never Read Coulter Again, It Will Be Too Soon”

I talked to John Barrie, the plagiarism expert the New York Post relied on to identify Ann Coulter’s stolen allegedly passages, fresh off his MSNBC appearance last night.

He told me the paper had approached him with Coulter’s book after she appeared on Larry King to discuss her comments about 9/11 widows — having called them “witches” and saying “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much” in her latest book.

“The next day, [NYPost reporter] Philip Recchia called me and said, Ann Coulter’s book. . . let’s run that through,” Barrie told me. But his company does its analysis by computer, so the book had to be scanned into a digital format. “The New York Post, at their expense, OCR’d every damn page of that book.

“Oh, my God, how long is that book?” Barrie added. “By the way, if I never read Ann Coulter again, it will be too soon.”

The paper also scanned in the last 12 months of Coulter’s columns for Barrie to analyze.

It didn’t take long to find evidence of plagiarism, Barrie said. “After we found three in the book, we called it quits. I think we found four of her syndicated columns that had problems.” But the task proved draining, he said — on himself, not his technology. “After combing through Ann Coulter for a while, it doesn’t take long before you want to call it quits. I want to prove the technology, but I don’t want to make my eyes bleed.”

Barrie confirmed that Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Coulter’s columns to over 100 newspapers around the country, called him twice yesterday. UPS’ Kathie Kerr had told me yesterday that they want to review a copy of Barries “report” before making a comment.

But Barrie says he won’t be sharing anything with UPS unless they sign up to use his technology. “When I talk to them tomorrow, I will tell them we’ll be happy to share these results with you, as soon as you buy this service.”

For the purpose of reviewing these most recent charges of plagiarism, Barrie said both the Post and MSNBC have run the examples themselves, which UPS can match up on their own.