Comments on Cleveland Uber Alles: Abe Lincoln, Plagiarist Nathan Newman's essential...

That this story got any legs at all says more abou...

2005-11-11T10:51:00.000-05:00

That this story got any legs at all says more about the gullibility of the journalists who first pushed it and of readers who bought into the notion that what a politician writes in a letter is the same as what some kid writes in an essay. To recap:

No copyright violation took place.

When the fact that the source wasn't cited came out, Brown acknowledged the source and appologized. End of story. Brown acted with integrity. This is a tempest in a teapot if I ever saw one.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your post. As...

2005-11-10T18:24:00.000-05:00

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your post. As for anonymous's comment, he's comparing apples and oranges. First, a politician using someone else's writing with permission isn't exactly like the example of a buddy letting you use his old term paper -- and for one good reason. Politicians rarely write their own stuff. They hire all sorts of uncredited people to write their stuff and help them analyze policy issues. Voters, on the other hand, aren't a bunch of profs grading politicians on their writing skills. Instead, we grade politicians on the concerns they have and the positions they take. Sometimes politicians are able to get to those positions all on their own; other times, they get there through the help of uncredited writers and advisors. All that matters to me as a voter is that he got there.

The second example is even less relevant. TV news shows purport to be independent sources of the news, not simply flacks for the administration or any particular political party. If a TV news show is airing party propaganda without identifying it as such, the TV news show has breached their promise to be objective. Again, it's not the same thing as a politician failing to credit a like-minded politically active analyst with authorship of a piece of analysis that the politician happens to agree with.

In my mind, Sherrod Brown's failure to credit Nathan Newman with authorship was at least sloppy, and was certainly a bit rude to Nathan Newman. But if Nathan Newman gave permission, it wasn't illegal, and if Nathan Newman's not offended, who am I to get offended on his behalf?

By your standards George W Bush--or any other poli...

2005-11-10T11:37:00.000-05:00

By your standards George W Bush--or any other politician for that matter--is a plagiarist every time he gives a speech without acknowledging that the language contained within it is the work of a staff of speech writers named David Frum and whomever.

The fact is politicians use other people’s language all the time without attributing it (thus the point of the post), and we, the people, generally don’t trouble ourselves much about it.

No one cares if Bush even knows or understands what he’s saying, only how well his flight suit fits, etc., and ultimately, what people do care about—and do need to care about—is whether or not the Bush administration (and not Bush himself) is honest both in terms of the facts they site (e.g. the atrocious lie that climate change is not settled science) and the actions they claim they will undertake on our behalf (e.g. defend us from the evildoers, whatever).

By this standard—-and not within the juvenile context of whether or not a child is responsible enough to do his own work for high school English class—-Brown is doing just fine, and he’s really being smeared by the DeWine camp, who have been pushing this story to the PD.

Not to defend The PD's editorial ... but, come on,...

2005-11-10T11:15:00.000-05:00

Not to defend The PD's editorial ... but, come on, if a buddy said it was OK with him if you put your name on his old term paper, does that make it right? If the White House tells a TV news show it's OK to put the station's logo on a tape actually generated by a GOP-paid flack, is that proper? Sherrod plagiarized. I think the PD's editorial made too much out of it, but, geez, let's not be as knee-jerk as those GOP senators who were flooding the airwaves even before Scooter was indicted, trying to explain how breaking the law wasn't really, you know, against the law.