Some context: Ambrose was born in Lovington, Illinois, to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book. Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense: I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from. A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral dissertation. The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's more than 40 works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.
Was he convicted?
A: Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning:
Some context: John F. Stossel was born on March 6, 1947, in Chicago Heights, Illinois, the younger of two sons, to Jewish parents who left Germany before Hitler rose to power. They joined a Congregationalist church in the U.S., and Stossel was raised Protestant. He grew up on Chicago's affluent North Shore and graduated from New Trier High School. Stossel characterizes his older brother, Tom, as "the superstar of the family", commenting, "While I partied and played poker, he studied hard, got top grades, and went to Harvard Medical School."
Progressive organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and Media Matters for America (MMfA) have criticized Stossel's work, for what they perceived as a lack of balance of coverage and distortion of facts. For example, Stossel was criticized for a segment on his October 11, 1999, show during which he argued that AIDS research has received too much funding, "25 times more than on Parkinson's, which kills more people." FAIR responded that AIDS had killed more people in the United States in 1999, but Stossel was speaking in more broad terms than a single country over a single year. In a February 2000 Salon.com feature on Stossel entitled "Prime-time propagandist", David Mastio wrote that Stossel has a conflict of interest in donating profits from his public speaking engagements to, among others, a non-profit called "Stossel in the Classroom" which includes material for use in schools, some of which uses material made by Stossel. University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith has alleged that Stossel, in his September 1999 special Is America #1?, used an out-of-context clip of Galbraith to convey the notion that Galbraith advocated the adoption by Europe of the free market economics practiced by the United States, when in fact Galbraith actually advocated that Europe adopt some of the United States' social benefit transfer mechanisms such as Social Security, which is the economically opposite view. Stossel denied any misrepresentation of Galbraith's views and stated that it was not his intention to convey that Galbraith agreed with all of the special's ideas. However, he re-edited that portion of the program for its September 2000 repeat, in which Stossel paraphrased, "Even economists who like Europe's policies, like James Galbraith, now acknowledge America's success."
Did he argue using that formula for his other views?
A:
Stossel denied any misrepresentation of Galbraith's views and stated that it was not his intention to convey that Galbraith agreed with all of the special's ideas.