Blog No Longer Posting Wrongly Attributed Sowell Piece

By: Dave Astor A piece wrongly attributed to columnist Thomas Sowell seems to have finally been removed from "The Right Scale" blog.

As E&P reported Friday, Creators Syndicate had been seeking the deletion since Aug. 4. The syndicate thought the blogger (at DickMcdonald.blogspot.com) might have written the piece himself and slapped Sowell's name on it.

E&P was subsequently tipped off to a Snopes.com post that said a not-by-Sowell piece has been an e-mail circulating the Internet, meaning "The Right Scale" blogger may have posted some or all of that e-mail.

"This e-mail is an item of unknown authorship which was originally simply credited as the work of 'Anonymous' or 'A Concerned American' before someone tacked on a preface that mistakenly attributed it to Thomas Sowell," Snopes.com stated.

Snopes.com posted seven paragraphs from the piece wrongly attributed to Sowell, and those paragraphs exactly match seven of the many paragraphs in "The Right Scale"-posted piece. But Creators President Richard S. Newcombe said this morning that some of the other paragraphs could have still have been written by "The Right Scale" blogger under Sowell's name.

Creators, which couldn't reach "The Right Scale" blogger because his site has no e-mail address or comments section, had been trying to get Google to take down the wrongly attributed piece.

Google -- whose Blogger program provides the tools for "The Right Scale" -- has not yet returned a Friday call from E&P.

Earlier this summer, noted Newcombe, another piece wrongly attributed to Sowell appeared on the Web. He said it was taken down with the help of Yahoo.

Newcombe also said "The Right Scale" is still running syndicated columns that it might not have permission to use. Some of the columns most recently posted on the blog are by Pat Buchanan (Creators), Ann Coulter (Universal Press Syndicate), and Gail Collins (New York Times/New York Times News Service).

Friday's E&P piece can be seen here.

The Snopes.com post can be seen here.