A University of Tennessee journalism professor is disputing allegations he breached journalistic ethics by plagiarizing the words and conclusions of others in a report a conservative advocacy group paid him $115,000 to write.

Professor Stuart Brotman was not working at the university when the alleged plagiarism occurred, and UT has taken no action him because it was a “business dispute,” not an academic one, according to a letter included in the lawsuit filed by the State Government Leadership Foundation.

Brotman conceded in testimony Wednesday he failed to use quotation marks around sentences and phrases from sentences written by others or otherwise identify the true author of those words.

Another researcher discovered the passages in Brotman's work that appeared to be "word-for-word" copying, and alerted the foundation, saying "it was disturbing."

Testimony in U.S. District Court Wednesday revealed that UT concluded it had no business looking into Brotman’s alleged plagiarism because he wasn’t a journalism professor at the university when he wrote the report at issue.

Brotman has been teaching journalism students since January 2016, and wrote the report for the Washington, D.C.-based conservative advocacy group in 2015.

Government broadband fight

The State Government Leadership Foundation reached out to Brotman and his firm, Brotman Communications, in 2015 after the FCC tried to block states, including Tennessee, from barring the creation or expansion of municipal broadband systems.

The FCC was trying to create competition to spur broadband services, and provide Americans with more choices and lower prices. Tennessee’s law, however, wouldn’t let cities operate broadband services outside their boundaries. Chattanooga officials had been trying to do just that to provide services to surrounding rural areas deemed a “digital desert.”

Traditional cable and broadband companies balked at the open-competition model and went to war against the FCC. The foundation supported the private companies and hired Brotman and Dr. George Ford, a researcher for the advocacy group Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies, to study the law and the numbers and make a case the FCC had overstepped its bounds.

Ford didn’t know Brotman or the laws at play. Ford’s task was to examine the economics of private vs. public broadband service.

'He copied and pasted you.'

Ford testified Wednesday he and Brotman exchanged their reports in September 2015. Ford sent Brotman’s report to Lawrence Spiwak, a colleague he considered an expert on the relevant laws.

Spiwak immediately recognized his own words and ideas in Brotman’s report, Ford said.

“(Spiwak) said, ‘He copied me,’” Ford testified. “My response was, ‘He copied and pasted you.’”

Ford then decided to conduct his own investigation. He typed sentences — those without quotation marks or other attribution — from Brotman’s report “into Google, and it was coming up with direct hits,” Ford said.

Brotman, testimony showed, had used passages —word-for-word — from Spiwak’s work, FCC rulings, a Department of Justice legal brief and other published material without quotations or author identification.

“We decided it was best to send it to the client and note that the plagiarism is striking," Ford said.

He said he wanted no part of the report, or Brotman. The foundation wound up publishing Ford’s report. It's not clear what Ford earned for his work.

“It would ruin Stuart Brotman, that’s for sure,” Ford said of his thoughts at the time about whether the foundation should publish Brotman’s report. “It would result in him being humiliated … and then by association, I think my reputation would have been damaged as well.”

'Made us look like fools'

Foundation representative Matthew Ray testified the group was alarmed by Ford’s plagiarism allegation and confronted Brotman.

“It would have made us look like fools,” Ray said. “We asked him to revise the report.”

Brotman conceded in testimony Wednesday he quoted entire sentences and phrases without identifying the authors.

“They’re the same words,” he said repeatedly as foundation attorney Kyle Carpenter read aloud examples of Brotman’s words and the words of the original author.

Brotman defended instances in which he used footnotes to identify some documents from which he had used passages, but conceded his report included sentences and phrases that were not his own. Brotman never used the word “plagiarism” in his testimony.

The foundation asked Brotman to strip the report of plagiarized material, “run it through anti-plagiarism software,” and revise it, he said. Brotman said he did. But Carpenter detailed repeated instances in the revised report of Brotman using the words of others without identifying the true authors. Brotman conceded each one.

Hacked by Iranians

Brotman said he couldn’t explain why the revised report contained the words of others without attribution. He said the cause could be a March 2018 hack of thousands of U.S. professors by a ring of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard because it “corrupted” some of his files. Nine suspects were charged in the massive hacking.

The foundation already had paid Brotman. It demanded its money back, but Brotman struck first, suing the foundation for sharing his “confidential” report with Ford. That claim has since been dismissed. The foundation is now suing Brotman to get its money back.

Brotman’s attorney, James Friauf, contended Brotman wasn’t asked to produce an original work of his own words and ideas but instead provide a “review” of research already done on the topic.

Friauf has not presented witnesses on Brotman’s behalf or made his final argument. The hearing continues Thursday.

The 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals wound up slapping down the FCC in 2016, serving up a victory to the cable and telecom industry and preserving Tennessee’s law.