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Obsessing Over Plagiarism (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

I knew Melania Trump wasn’t a plagiarist even before her husband’s campaign finally identified the staffer who “inadvertently” lifted material from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech and inserted it, barely altered, into Melania’s speech for the 2016 Republican National Convention. Paul Manafort, chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign, was right when he said, “To think that she’d be cribbing Michelle Obama’s words is crazy.”

That’s why I knew that Melania was merely telling a little white lie when she claimed to have written virtually all of the speech herself. An unnecessary fib since having professional help with an important message is not something to be ashamed of, and in the Encyclopedia of Political Dishonesty, 2016 Edition, it wouldn’t have been worth a footnote.

So I’m giving the current Mrs. Trump a pass. I consider her a victim of incompetence, including her own decision to let someone who isn’t a political professional ghostwrite her speech. (Meredith McIver works for Trump’s company, not his campaign, but anyone who went to high school should have known better than to take someone else’s work, tweak a few words and call it good.)

Someone is going to email me to say I’m so naïve, that poor McIver was just someone to throw under the campaign bus after denying the obvious didn’t work. Maybe so.

Someone else will complain that “the media” are obsessed with plagiarism while ignoring the really important stuff, like Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Half of that is true. Just because the multiple Benghazi and the email investigations didn’t turn out the way Republicans hoped does not mean they were ignored.

But the media are obsessed with plagiarism. We’re obsessed with plagiarism like the NFL is obsessed with ball pressure and the Olympics are obsessed with drug testing and Apple is obsessed with the shape of Samsung’s cellphones. Those of us who are vulnerable to having the value of our work undercut by cheaters take it really seriously, and we make a big stinking deal out of plagiarism to try to discourage future theft.

It’s why Barack Obama was called out when he used a thinly disguised version of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s “Just Words” speech. (Unlike the Trump campaign, Obama promptly acknowledged the source, and both men said Patrick encouraged Obama to use it. That makes the episode more similar to Donald Trump Jr.’s use last week of language first used in a column by Frank Buckley, who helped write the speech the nominee’s son delivered.)

It’s why Joe Biden was shamed out of the 1988 presidential race when he used — sometimes with attribution, sometimes without — a variation on Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock’s moving speech about his working-class family. (Biden also admitted plagiarizing from a Law Review article in law school, which didn’t help his credibility when the Kinnock knockoff became public.)

As a young reporter, I was amused when I got a letter on law firm letterhead informing me that Styrofoam was a proper noun; today, I understand that kind of diligence completely. My company tries to stay on top of the unscrupulous aggregators that help themselves to complete stories off our website while still respecting the doctrine of “fair use,” which is important to our products as well.

But most of the clickbait aggregators at least credit sources of content they use to populate their websites. A couple of times I’ve found my work repackaged under someone else’s byline, and that kind of theft feels just as invasive as any other kind of theft.

In both cases, the plagiarists insisted (huffily) that they had never even seen my work (sort of like the Trump campaign originally denying that any part of Melania’s speech was derived from Michelle Obama’s). As soon as I sent copies of my work to their editors, they suddenly remembered that maybe they might have seen my work after all and maybe possibly been unconsciously influenced. Yeah, influenced to have the same idea, to make the same arguments, to use the same structure, to use the same quotes, blah, blah, blah.

One of them whined that he hadn’t even been paid for the story he worked so hard to rip off; he just wrote it for “exposure.” That’s even worse. Now some publisher has been led to believe that someone with my skills will work for free. (Please don’t tell my boss that.)

Here’s the bottom line:

Do your own work. If you are inspired by someone else, as I often am, give them credit. No one will ever think worse of you for acknowledging influences, and they’ll know you are a thief if you get caught plagiarizing.


Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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