That’s Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top public policy ethicist.
Here’s the reason for the apology:
The plagiarism came to light when Baptist blogger and Baylor University Ph.D. student Aaron Weaver posted a partial transcript from one of Land’s shows on his blog, TheBigDaddyWeave.com. The unattributed remarks were made on Land’s March 31 show about media, race and Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black Florida teenager who was shot and killed by a neighborhood security guard.
Weaver discovered that more than half the material for Land’s short segment was quoted nearly verbatim from Jeffrey Kuhner’s March 29 Washington Times Op-Ed, “Obama foments racial division.”
After that discovery, Weaver listened to the third hour of the same program and discovered that Land again used unattributed material, this time from an article in “Investor’s Business Daily.” He discovered a third example in Land’s Feb. 4 show in which Land quoted from a Washington Examiner editorial.
Here’s some context for the remarks, as well as some info on what you’re missing if you don’t regularly tune in to Land’s show:
In his radio show, Land described activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as “racial ambulance chasers” who, along with fringe groups like the Black Panthers, are fomenting a “mob mentality” in the Trayvon Martin case that is akin to what the Ku Klux Klan used to do to blacks in the South.
More here (HT: Laura Seay).
