Plagiarism: “The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.”
There has been considerable discussion this week about plagiarism in the wake of the speech Monday evening by Donald Trump’s wife at the Republican National Convention. Melania Trump, with little doubt and more than once, used very similar words to a speech made by First Lady Michelle Obama in 2008.
Rather than join the chorus of voices who would give Melania a zero grade for what she said, I submit the real problem here is that this transgression occurs so often in these modern times to render it commonplace.
I was in the journalism business for many years, and though I’m not working for The Man any more, I remember too many instances of plagiarism, as defined above.
The vast majority of political speeches are not written by the presenter. They are written by speechwriters, such as Peggy Noonan for Ronald Reagan all those years ago. I’ve been told Bill Clinton and Barack Obama wrote their own, but if that’s true, they’d be in a minority.
So most speeches are passed off as the words of the person speaking, but they’re not. They were crafted by professional wordsmiths.
One of the best examples of plagiarism was the common practice of having a writer in the Republican Michigan Senate Office write a weekly column for publication in local hometown newspapers, suggesting each was penned by the State Senator in that district, but it was a lie. For example, because I was editor for four publications in Barry County 20 years ago, I would receive State Senator Joanne Emmons’ weekly column and print it, including her photo. Imagine my disappointment when I learned from a fifth publication for which I was editor, in Kent County, that Senator Dick Posthumus had “written” exactly the same piece that week.
In my eyes, it was deception and plagiarism. In the eyes of the GOP and my bosses, it was just business as usual.
Another form of plagiarism was the common practice of astro-turfing. That’s when somebody writes a letter for you and others identified as being of like mind politically and urges you to sign it and send it to the local newspaper. I’d get a large number of these astro-turfed missives at five publications, urging me to publish them as letters to the editor on some hot button issue such as guns or abortion. But I knew they were not crafted by John Q. Smith of Anytown, USA, so I just tossed them all into the circular file.
Yet I caught the Grand Rapids Press several times publishing these astro-turfed letters (because they had come to me as well). I e-mailed editorial page editor Ed Golder to complain, but he wouldn’t publish my protest letter, explaining he was not going to allow me to excoriate his newspaper.
In this case, not only was plagiarism accepted, it was defended.
Yet another example was in music. Not long after teen heart-throb crooner Eric Carman hit the charts twice in 1976 with “All By Myself” and “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” I appeared on Ed Buchanan’s “Back Slide Slim” show on WLAV radio to prove musically that Carman stole the former’s tune from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concert No. 2 and the latter’s from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. Ed agreed with my position, but the greeting I got from West Michigan listeners was collective yawning and “so what?”
Carman had the audacity on his record album to claim “All words and music by Eric Carman.” But as Back Slide Slim said in his closing argument on the show, “No, Kiddies, Eric didn’t do it all by himself.”
