COMM 317 -- Obama, plagiarism, speechwriting and media ethics

Before the flap about alleged plagiarism in presidential candidate Barack Obama's speeches fades into ancient history (which is probably a good place for it), we need to look at a couple of ethical points it raised. They're important, even though the controversy itself probably wasn't.

Here's what last week's "plagiarism wars" showed (in addition to an increasingly desperate campaign by Obama's opponent Hillary Clinton). Different people have different standards on plagiarism, and we'd better know them all in self-defense.

Let's try something in class today. Below are linked several stories about Obama's speeches and the great plagiarism food fight ... and a cute cartoon by David Horsey of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (at least I think it's cute). Read them, discuss and blog about these questions. We'll want to talk first and blog later. The great Clinton v. Obama plagiarim food-fight wasn't a court case, but it can be analyzed like one:

• What are the facts here? Facts are facts, and your factual analysis will be like you did briefing court cases. Think of Sergeant Friday in the old TV reruns: Just the facts, ma'am.
  
• What ethical principles are involved? (This would correspond to the law in a court case.) You will probably find several. Say what they are, and whose they are, e.g. college students, news reporters, desperate candidates, etc.
  
• Choose a principle or two. What issue does the principle involve? Choose one or two of the most important issues, and be ready to say why its important.
  
• How would you decide the issue? As a candidate? As a speechwriter? As a reporter?

Readings. In today's Washington Post, staff writer Alec MacGillis has a good analysis of Obama's speeches. Says MacGillis:

Obama gave his rivals an opening to question his speechmaking recently when he borrowed a riff about the power of words that was used two years ago by Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D), a friend and informal adviser. But the episode also illustrated a basic fact about Obama's ever-evolving stump speech: It is replete with outside influences, from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ("the fierce urgency of now") to Edith Childs, the councilwoman in Greenwood County, S.C., who inspired the "fired up, ready to go" chant that Obama used for months to end the speech.

To his critics, these influences are proof that Obama's rhetoric is less original and inspired than his supporters believe. "If your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words," Clinton said in Thursday's debate in Texas. ". . . Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox."

To his admirers, this magpie-like tendency to pluck lines and ideas from here and there and meld them into a coherent whole is inherent to good speechwriting and part of what makes Obama effective on the stump. It has allowed him to adapt quickly to rivals' attacks, which he often absorbs into his remarks, parroting them and turning them to his advantage.

Different strokes, as I heard somewhere but am unable to cite, for different folks.

(By the way, Clinton was playing fast and loose there with the intellectual property of another. "Xerox" is not a verb, as Xerox Corp. will be glad to tell you. It's a registered trademark. She should have said "photocopy." Unauthorized use of a trademark isn't exactly plagiarism. But it's close. Close enough for government work, at least. Now where did I hear that? You've got to be careful.)

Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate.com, raised a point last week that's especially important for us. His title says it all ... "Don't Call It Plagiarism." But Shafer's point is some people do, and in some contexts what Obama did would be plagiarism:

Without a doubt, Obama echoes Patrick note for note, and if he had included this passage as part of a student paper at, say, Harvard, the school would rightly condemn him for plagiarism, which the school defines as "passing off a source's information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them -— an act of lying, cheating, and stealing."

Shafer links, by the way, to a Harvard University handout defining plagiarism in academic essays. It's as good an explanation of the academic conventions as you can find. Confusing, but good. The conventions themselves are confusing.

If Obama were writing his speech for a student paper at Harvard (or one at Benedictine for that matter), he'd say something like this: As was so compellingly enunciated by Patrick, D. (2006), the words of King, M. (1963), ... and so on and so on. Please please please please please do not write that kind of stuff in my classes. But that's not the kind of writing that we're talking about here. We're talking about political stump speeches. Shafer adds:

On the conceptual level, nobody can accuse Obama of having stolen from Patrick the ideas or the information that "words matter," a proposition that is self-evident to every educated person this side of Hillary Clinton.

So, did Obama steal the words?

I think not. Most campaign speeches are composed by speechwriters who assume the candidate's persona. The candidate becomes the public "author" of these words when he speaks them, even if all he did was a light edit of the script. A speechwriter would never claim he was plagiarized by his candidate, nor would a volunteer. In fact, the volunteer would be elated.

Obama, by all accounts I've read, takes a much more active role in speech writing than most politicians. But the point remains: They's a lot of ghostwriting in politics and public relations. In the right context, it is entirely ethical.

(Personal disclosure: I used to ghostwrite op-ed columns for the Illinois state treasurer. I'd tape his off-the-cuff remarks and weave his words together with his published writing, often in the form of word-for-word magazine interviews, so I could be reasonably sure the column was in his voice. But if I was doing my job right, he did very little editing. The practice may sound deceptive, but it's universally accepted. I thought, and still think, it was entirely ethical.)

Shafer was not the only writer for Slate.com to weigh in on the issue. Timothy Noah, who maintains a blog aptly named "Chatterbox," seems to have caught ABC News doing something that looks a lot like plagiarism ... at least to some people ... and when it was reporting on the great Obama plagiarism flap, no less. Says Noah:

ABC News' Sunlen Miller and Teddy Davis claimed on Feb. 19 that the story of Obama borrowing Patrick's "just words" line was "first reported by ABC News' Jake Tapper." Not true! The story of Obama borrowing Patrick's "just words" line was first reported by Scott Helman of the Boston Globe in April 2007.

ABC News' attempt to claim credit for breaking this bogus plagiarism story is, if anything, a greater moral offense than Obama's bogus plagiarism itself (though both ethical breaches are measured in microns). After all, ABC News is claiming affirmatively that it broke the plagiarism story. Obama, though he borrowed Patrick's words (just as, on previous occasions, Patrick has borrowed his) never claimed affirmatively that he invented them. Or rather, that his campaign staff invented them, though here things get a little complicated because the line was probably fed to both Patrick and Obama by the political strategist, David Axelrod, who has worked for both of them.

To support his point, Noah links to a column on plagiarism in The Atlantic by James Fallows, senior reporter for the magazine who once served as a speechwriter for then-President Jimmy Carter. Fallows also discusses the ethics of speechwriting ... and of journalism:

A plagiarism charge stings when it underscores the idea that the plagiarist is trying to mask some deficiency: The D student looks over the A student's shoulder to copy during a test. Does any sane person actually think that Barack Obama is deficient in expressing himself? His first book was a "real" book, of a quality most "real" writers would be proud to have matched. (The second one was more of a campaign book, and less in his own voice.) To the extent this flurry is designed to introduce subliminal concerns -- and, let's face it, concerns tied to racial stereotypes -- that Obama is not quite deserving intellectually, a flim-flam man, it really is contemptible.

So basically Fallows lets Obama off the hook. But look what he says about professional writers:

... it's different when people whose job is writing -- people who know very well that the exact phrasing of ideas is each writer's brand and property, and who have plenty of time, in private, to check and perfect the phrases on which they will be judged -- copy others' work. I'm a hawk on punishing them. But to think that this is anything like a candidate's constant search for ways to explain his message, in real time, is unrealistic and wrong. As someone has already said, in an interview or post somewhere whose insight I'm stealing, It's fine for the Hillary Clinton campaign to adopt "Fired up! Ready to go!" as its new motto, and it's fine for Barack Obama to use this way of explaining the importance of hope.

But what about professional writers who happen to be writing speeches for politicians?