Diana Kinnert is a publicist, former hope of the CDU – and recently targeted by plagiarism hunter Stephan Weber. She is said to have copied more than 200 places. Kinnert reacts differently than most celebrities whose works Weber publicly put to the test: she admits the mistakes directly.
After allegations of plagiarism in two of her books, the publicist and former CDU politician Diana Kinnert apologized for the lack of care in her works. “I looked at the evidence for both books and I have to admit that I made mistakes in correctly citing and paraphrasing and the completeness of the source references,” said Kinnert to the “Zeit”. The well-known plagiarism hunter Stephan Weber wants more than 200 incorrect places in their two books “For the Future I See Black” (2017) and “The New Loneliness” (2021), which he writes in a blog entry on his website.
The research published by Weber on Friday states that Kinnert copied from several authors such as Ulf Poschardt and Leander Scholz without citation, i.e. either did not provide a clean source on site or in the bibliography.
Both books also contain passages from Wikipedia, writes the Austrian expert. “Whereas the first book is characterized by large-format, almost verbatim assumptions, the assumptions in the second book are smaller, but all the more numerous,” says Weber. “In the first book, 22 plagiarism fragments were found, in the second 203 plagiarism fragments. In many plagiarism sites, violations of the copyrights of the authors concerned can also be assumed.”
According to the “Zeit” report, Kinnert apologizes to the authors whose authorship did not receive the recognition they needed. “I’m also sorry for these mistakes, because they have an effect on general system trust,” says the author. She didn’t do it on purpose. “I didn’t work carefully and was careless. I’m sorry.”
According to the report, the 31-year-old does not want to go into the background to the mistakes. “Whether it was a life crisis, a double burden or a structural problem – in the end it would have been my job not to create a book when I was overwhelmed,” said Kinnert accordingly. In addition, according to her own statement, the publicist is already in contact with the publishers so that the positions can be checked.
