Mark Murray (MSNBC First Read, Deputy Political Director) in his comments today re “Ronald Reagan’s sudden participation in Pennsylvania” compared the video of Hillary Clinton repeating a joke that is in the common lore to Obama’s plagiarizing Deval Patrick’s speech and dismissed both examples as “silly”! As a result of many of MSNBC’s broadcasts, millions of young people in this country are being misinformed as to what constitutes plagiarism!
The media should stop confusing students everywhere and causing teachers all kinds of problems; they need to correctly inform the public what constitutes plagiarism. If Deval Patrick had delivered his “just words” speech to a speech class at Harvard and if, later, Obama had delivered his “just words” speech to the speech class, the professor would have given Obama an “F” and told him that he had plagiarized Patrick’s speech. If Obama had told the teacher that Patrick had said he could “borrow” that portion of his speech, do you think the professor would have changed Obama’s grade! No way!
Murray’s comparison of Obama’s “just words” speech and
Hillary Clinton’s
repeating an old joke is ludicrous. Hillary Clinton’s telling a joke that is well known and has no author
is not plagiarism!
Obama committed plagiarism and
admitted that
he committed plagiarism when he said that he should have credited Deval Patrick with his “just words” speech! Obama repeated a major rift from Deval Patrick's speech with the same intonations and inflections and did not tell the audience or the media that the “just words” portion of his speech came from Patrick!
The major point that the media continues to gloss over is not that Obama plagiarized Patrick’s speech but that
Obama led the audience and the media to believe that the speech was his own! It matters none whatsoever that Obama and Patrick are friends or that they share ideas or that Patrick told Obama he could use his words. It does not matter that politicians sometimes use the same common phrases. I can say the words “I Have a Dream” in a speech without mentioning Martin Luther King’s name. I don’t have to mention King’s name because everyone knows or should know that those words are not mine!
What matters is that the audience and the media believed Obama’s words were his own!
The media did not say that Obama was being “silly” when he said that he should have credited Patrick; instead, the media started using Obama’s talking points and began calling those who said Obama had committed plagiarism “silly”! The media used flowery words and phrases like “shared ideas and phrases” and “borrowed” to describe what Obama had done.
Either the media does not know what constitutes plagiarism OR they are intentionally misinforming and confusing millions of young people just because they do not want to present negative information about Obama.
I’ll bet Joe Biden wishes he could have called the media silly and gotten away with it! Wonder why the media attacked Joe Biden so viciously for plagiarism but kind of snickers at Obama when he commits plagiarism and says, yeah, we're all being silly!
When Tim Goeglein, top aide to President Bush, resigned in February, 2008, because he had committed plagiarism, I noticed that MSNBC barely mentioned it. Apparently, MSNBC wants to avoid the topic entirely for fear that the public will find out what truly constitutes plagiarism, that it is not silly, and that there can be major, negative consequences for those who plagiarize!
Those who commit plagiarism and refer to anyone who calls them on it as silly generally have done it many times and do not see it as cheating! And, generally, those who resort to plagiarism are shallow and lack the ability to say things in their own words. Obama has speechwriters for his speeches but can't use them in debates. Have you noticed a huge difference in his ability to use words in speeches and his ability to use words in debates!
MSNBC should copy and distribute the following information regarding plagiarism from
Plagiarism.org, 4/2/08, to all news anchors, pundits, and analysts; and, they should use it to correctly inform the millions of young people who are now thoroughly confused as to what constitutes plagiarism!
Many people think of plagiarism as copying another's work, or borrowing someone
else's original ideas. But terms like "copying" and "borrowing" can disguise the
seriousness of the offense:
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means
1. to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
2. to use (another's production) without crediting the source
3. to commit literary theft
4. to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.
In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.
