In a lengthy article published June 12 on the New Republic website, writer Christopher Ketcham states that Harper’s magazine killed a 2010 investigative report by noted progressive journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges after one of the magazine’s fact-checkers discovered apparent instances of plagiarism.

Ketcham writes that Hedges’ article, about poverty in the New Jersey town of Camden, was killed after allegations that Hedges had plagiarized a similar story by a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer named Matt Katz.

According to Ketcham:

The fact-checker was assigned to speak to Hedges about the material lifted from Matt Katz. According to [Harper’s editor Theodore] Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges told them that he had shared the draft with Katz, who, Hedges claimed, had approved his use of Katz’s language and reporting….

But when the editors at Harper’s asked Katz about Hedges’s account, Katz told them he had not in fact seen the manuscript. “When I went back to Hedges, he tried to clarify by saying he didn’t mean that he had actually showed Katz the draft,” the fact-checker said. “He lied to me – lied to his fact-checker.”

Ketcham goes on to allege other instances of plagiarism on the part of Hedges, including one brought forth by a classics professor who suggests that a passage in Hedges’ best-selling book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is lifted from Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms.

Interestingly, Ketcham writes that he has been trying to get his article about Hedges published since 2012; both Salon and American Prospect apparently turned it down. Moreover, one of the people Ketcham accuses Hedges of plagiarizing is Ketcham’s wife, Petra Bartosiewicz.

In an aside near the end of his piece, Ketcham also includes this cautionary paragraph:

I reached out both to Chris Hedges and to the Nation Institute’s executive director, Taya Kitman, with a summary of the instances of plagiarism uncovered in the course of this investigation. In an e-mail, Kitman told me that, upon becoming aware of this story “some months ago” — when in December of 2012 I apprised the Nation Institute of the article in progress — both the Nation Institute and Nation Books “conducted a review of Hedges’s writing in his capacity as a Nation Books author and as an investigative fund reporter.” Kitman wrote that this internal investigation did not find any instances of plagiarism. “Chris has been one of our most valuable and tireless public intellectuals,” she said in her e-mailed statement.