Well, the poop REALLY hit the fan for Nada Behziz today. The Bakersfield Californian has a giant front page article all about, “A Californian reporter’s web of deceit.” Ouch. According to the article, of Nada’s work, “more than a third contain a variety of serious problems including plagiarized material, misattributed quotes and information, factual errors or people whose existence could not be verified.” Double OUCH!!
The funniest thing she did (if any of this can be called funny) was make up a “language professor at UCLA” named Michael Gispen. Turns out, “the university has no ‘language professor’ title” and there is no trace of a man named Michael Gispen anywhere. Yikes. That’s pretty ballsy. The article goes on to describe how, once they became aware of the problem, they began to check more deeply into Nada’s background. According to The Californian, her resume was also full of holes and half truths, including the fact that she was never awarded a degree from the university she attended. Oh the shame! Poor thing is going to have to change her name, dye her hair, and move to another country if she wants to work again.
Nada seems to be maintaining her innocence. She has hired and attorney and demanded a retraction from the paper. When asked if she had any comments for the article, she said, “This is a witch hunt. Too bad your news organization is not this vigilant in pursuing true wrong doers.” Hmmm. Maybe so. But, I can’t help but think that a paper who just fired someone for making stuff up, wouldn’t run an article full of made up information.
For her sake, I hope she’s right.
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