In their desperate efforts to discredit me prior to the publication of my new book on Jim Reeves, the anonymous attack dogs over on the trash site have been working overtime trying to dredge up anything they can which they think might reflect unfavorably on me.

They have found an old article which appeared on the liberal website Slate back in 2000, in which my name was mentioned along with other reputable print and online publishers. (You can see the article here).

It seems a writer named Jay Jennings had written a piece in 1998 that had appeared in The New York Times, and then been widely circulated, unattributed, all around the web -- where we ran across it.

Mr. Jennings subsequently became aware of its extensive circulation on the internet and understandably wanted to see his name attached to it. However, he also apparently saw this as an opportunity to put the squeeze on anybody and everybody who had innocently reproduced his work, by making unreasonable and punitive monetary demands, which we all resisted.

"Plagiarism" means putting your name on someone else's work, and that's not what happened here. Yet that didn't stop Jennings from accusing a bunch of us of "stealing" his material.

The simple fact of the matter is, I saw an article online that I wanted to run as a sidebar to a piece we had already extensively researched and written for our regional glossy magazine, Midwest Today.

So I emailed the webmaster on whose site I read the unsigned article, and asked for permission to reprint it. Unfortunately, he never informed me that the material was not his.

I ran the piece as a sidebar without a byline in our magazine. Some months later, to my surprise, I received a letter from Jay Jennings who informed me he was the real author of the piece. He demanded an outrageous amount of money all out of proportion to standard writers' fees for our size of publication. In fact, he wanted an amount that was probably ten times more than what he'd been paid by the original newspaper that ran it. When I would not cave in to his demands, he wrote a sarcastic rant for Slate attacking me and others. (I note, with some satisfaction, that his editor described it as a "whine.")

What was interesting is that Mr. Jennings cited various examples of how this same article of his had already been widely disseminated on the web without his permission or his being given credit over the previous years before I had ever even come across it. Instead of blaming us, he should have looked to himself because he's the one that lost control of his intellectual property. How did he let this happen? And he should have directed his antipathy toward the webmasters who were using his material and lying about who wrote it.

In this sense, we were just as much victims as was he.

By Mr. Jennings' own account, this same article that we innocently printed had "appeared, mostly without attribution, on personal Web pages and large commercial sites, in print and Web site versions of magazines, and in the e-mail newsletters of business gurus."

If "large commercial sites" and other "magazines" could mistakenly believe someone besides Jennings wrote the article, I guess we were in pretty good company.

Unfortunately, while Mr. Jennings was hypocritically questioning our journalistic integrity, he himself was guilty of selectively quoting from a letter I'd sent him, thus misrepresenting my views. Besides this, he failed to note that in the same issue in which his piece had appeared, we had run a second sidebar, also from the web. In that case we had printed the author's name and even promoted a book he had written.

I posted a response on our own magazine website and was further surprised when the editors of Slate -- without asking our permission -- reproduced my response. While I was grateful to them for giving me an opportunity to reply to Mr. Jennings' rash attacks, it did not go unnoticed by us that Slate itself was guilty of copyright infringement by -- shall we say? -- "stealing" material from our site without permission.

Obviously, the Slate legal department was so alarmed by the tenor of Mr. Jennings' article and worried about their legal culpability for posting such a reckless story, that they rushed to print my response. In fact, two follow-up comments from me remain on their website underneath Mr. Jennings' article. They are obviously still concerned about fairness, accuracy and libel. Trash posters, take note.

So what this amounts to is a tempest in a teapot which is just being exploited by the anonymous trash website. It doesn't amount to anything.

Articles in Midwest Today have been reproduced and/or quoted by big-league media including CBS television in a documentary for which we were a source listed in the credits, ABC radio news, Family Circle magazine, and Catholic Digest. Many other media outlets, both large and small, as well as citizens groups, have been impressed enough by the quality of our work that they have reprinted some of our articles. The radio show we produce each week in tandem with our magazine airs on dozens of stations all across the Heartland.

I got tons of letters of support from other editors and publishers following Mr. Jennings' piece, who recognized we were innocent of any deliberate wrongdoing. Since I haven't seen anything Mr. Jennings has produced since then, I think he cut his own throat from a professional standpoint.

I am proud of my reputation as a journalist and do not take kindly to being smeared by the trash posters; hence this response. Being accused of plagiarism and theft by the anonymous yapping hounds on the trash site is really bemusing, since they routinely steal copyrighted material off Julie's site and distort it in an effort to help Connie Sanders, the woman who is selling Reeves artifacts that some would say were "stolen" by Ed Gregory who manipulated the situation while Mary lay ill. At the very least, these items were never paid for. -- Larry Jordan