lgf charles: attribution of credit

it's been said elsewhere, most notably by aceofspades, that charles is something just short of a complete content thief. he doesn't claim credit for others' content, but he's meager in dispensing credit to those who pass him content and fails to correct third parties when they praise him for content passed to him by others. basically, he spends all of his blogging hours prosecuting personal grudges while his readership sends him links to all the actual news items he posts. for this service, they sometimes get a "hat tip" acknowledgement at the foot of the post (which charles abbreviates to "H/T:"), often not. other bloggers stopped sending him tips because charles breaks and terminates the chain of cross-linkage by linking to the source, rather than to the blogger who sent him the link.

this post is a fine example: You Won’t Believe This: Women For Herman Cain

it's about the "women for cain" site, of course, and charles pursues two things about it: that the women pictured in the site's masthead are from a stock photography site and one contribution from a woman with creepy eyes and an absurd belief that cain was financially supporting a woman and keeping their relationship secret from his wife because he is a generous man and anonymity is keystone to the christian doctrine of charity.

run the post over a couple of times, click on all of the links. done? okay. here's what you might have noticed:  
 - no credit is given, not even a "hat tip".
 - all of the links are to the primary source (e.g., the link to the stock photo angle goes to the stock photography site the image was purchased from).

this, despite that charles' awareness of the story came from this pages post by iceweasel, who in turn got the story from talking points memo. the irony there is that tpm is credited right at the head of iceweasel's post because of a feature built into the pages code by charles so he and his monitors could immediately identify whether the content is from a "bad" source. ad hominem dismissal is employed frequently enough at lgf that charles automated it.

the stock photo angle came to charles from boingboing, and they got it from a blog called cynical-c. i know that because boingboing actually sends you to cynical-c in their link for the story. like you're supposed to. finally, the "creepy eyes lady" angle comes from a comment under the iceweasel page by wrenchwench.

charles grabbed all this together and posted it under his name without a shred of acknowledgement given to the people who originally worked it out. whether they care or not, i don't know. however, one can't help but recall that charles flipped the fuck out that one time someone failed to credit him scrupulously.