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Rand Paul to stop playing nice with media

Amid mounting plagiarism charges, Sen. Rand Paul has pledged to speak out more often against the media.

In an interview with National Review's Robert Costa, the normally media-friendly Paul said he is now going to speak out more against media outlets, especially if he feels he is being unfairly targeted.

“I’m being criticized for not having proper attribution, and yet they are able to write stuff that if I were their journalism teacher in college, I would fail them,” he told Costa.

Paul told Costa he was specifically irritated with the Associated Press and MSNBC for how they covered his talk at Liberty University last month. Though Paul didn't use the word abortion in that talk, the Associated Press used it in its coverage. Meanwhile, Rachel Maddow focused her attention on the part where Paul lifted some lines from the Gattaca movie Wikipedia entry.

(WATCH: Rachel Maddow accuses Rand Paul of ripping off Wikipedia)

“After a thoughtful speech, where I made six or eight references to 1984, Gattaca, My Left Foot, Einstein, Ray Bradbury, and Michelangelo, I’m then criticized for taking a couple lines from Wikipedia and nobody reports on what the speech was even about,” Paul said. “At least I saw the movie Gattaca, I read the book 1984.They didn’t even read my damn speech.”

Instances of plagiarism in speeches, columns and one of his books have been uncovered by multiple news outlets over the past few weeks. On Tuesday, the Washington Times announced they were cancelling a weekly column of Paul's after a September column had lifted parts from an article published in The Week.

(Also on POLITICO: The Washington Times suspends Rand Paul's columns)

The author of the Week article, Dan Stewart, wrote on Wednesday that he doesn't care if Paul plagiarized from him.

"I'm indifferent to being plagiarized because today's media environment has changed what it means to have ownership of a piece of writing," Stewart wrote in The Week. "Once your words are published online, they become part of the currency of the internet."

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.