Tyler Jones, spokesman for SC House Democrats, brings this to my attention:
According to Hutchins’ story, Rep. Rivers published an op-ed in the Charleston Post & Courier on Monday, July 21st under the byline of Samuel Rivers Jr.Hutchins quickly found this exact same editorial was recently published out west by a cattleman’s association group.———————————– Compare Op-Eds:—————————–—— How similar are the op-eds? Have a look for yourself:Excerpts from the Cattlemen’s Association Op-Ed:“In 1972, the CWA created a regulatory permitting system to control discharges (discharge includes dirt, manure, fertilizer, litter, pesticides, etc.) into “navigable waters.” The term “navigable waters” is defined in the CWA as “waters of the United States” and nothing more. This absurdly vague definition has provided the implementing federal agencies – namely EPA and the Corps – with the loophole they needed to systematically gain more and more regulatory authority over smaller and less significant “bodies of water” – a term used loosely – over the past 40 years.”“How did they do it? Through vague terms such as “neighboring,” ill-defined terms like “floodplain,” and expansive definitions such as “tributary.” Not to mention the agencies extremely broad definition of what is considered a “significant nexus” between isolated waters and downstream waters. The agencies also leave most of these important key terms up to the “best professional judgment” of the federal regulator. These legal terms give the regulatory agencies the loopholes they need to find your pond, puddle or ditch to be a “water of the U.S.” and leave landowners with more confusion than ever before.”Excerpts from Rep. River’s Op-Ed:“When passed in 1972, the Clean Water Act created a regulatory permitting system to control discharges (including dirt, manure, fertilizer, litter, pesticides, etc.) into “navigable waters.” The term “navigable waters” is defined in the CWA as “waters of the United States,” and nothing more. This vague definition has provided the implementing federal agencies (namely EPA and the Corps) with the loophole they needed to systematically gain more regulatory authority over smaller and less significant “bodies of water” over the past 40 years.”“This is done through vague terms such as “neighboring,” ill-defined terms like “floodplain,” and expansive definitions such as “tributary,” not to mention the agencies’ extremely broad definition of what is considered a “significant nexus” between isolated waters and downstream waters. The agencies also leave most of these important key terms up to the “best professional judgment” of the federal regulator. These legal terms give the regulatory agencies the loopholes they need to find your pond, puddle or ditch to be a “water of the U.S.,” leaving landowners with more confusion than ever before.”
As you can see, almost all of Rep. Rivers’ op-ed was lifted verbatim from the Cattlemen’s Association op-ed.
Confronted with the facts, Rep. Rivers doubled down telling Hutchins, “Those are my words with the information that was provided to me, let me put it like that.”It’s bad enough to plagiarize someone else’s work – present it as your own – and publish it in the state’s largest newspaper. But it’s even worse to lie about it after you’ve been caught.The voters of District 15 deserve a representative who will be open and honest with them about the issues confronting our state. Not someone who will copy and paste someone else’s work and claim it as their own. The voters deserve an apology and an explanation from Rep. Samuel Rivers.Sincerely,Tyler JonesPolitical DirectorSC House DemocratsP.S. Don’t forget Rep. Rivers has a Democratic opponent, Marian Redish, in the November elections. You can make a contribution to her campaign by visiting her website – www.MarianForHouse.com.
Tyler had asked me for my thoughts on this earlier, and so had Corey Hutchins. Both wanted to know what I would have done had such a piece run in The State when I was EPE. Corey just wanted to know what I thought off-the-record, but you know me, I don’t mind sharing what I told him…
The truth is that first, I don’t know exactly what I would have done. That sounds like a cop-out, but it’s the opposite of a cop-out — it’s me taking the question seriously.
And one thing I’ve learned over the years is that it’s hard to know exactly what you’ll do in a given situation until you’re in it, and dealing with the very specific facts and dynamics of the situation, and consulting with your colleagues about it. (While I have never been shy about making unilateral decisions, I learned to my greater humility that as smart as I may have thought I was, I was always smarter after a serious discussion with my fellow members of the editorial board. And sometimes I made a different decision as a result.)
If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll speculate that under such circumstances I MIGHT write a column about it, as it’s an interesting situation that sheds light on the piece that we ran, and also into the editorial process, which I always liked to do….
If I didn’t want to spend a column (a decidedly finite resource) on it, I might do a blog post about it. But then I would feel some obligation to let print-only readers know the controversy existed. Maybe a brief blurb leading people to the blog post.
But that’s first-blush. As I say, in the actual situation I might do something different…
So I don’t like to second-guess what another editor did or didn’t do. Speaking of which, it appears that what Charleston did do was take the piece off their website. An update from Corey:
UPDATE, 7/25: Rivers’ op-ed appears to have been pulled by The Post and Courier. The link to the commentary now goes to a page that reads, “Error 404 – This page is either no longer available or has been relocated.” A search for phrases from the op-ed on the paper’s site yielded no results.
Charles Rowe, the editorial page editor, didn’t have much to say when asked earlier today if the paper had any update on the situation. Rowe did not immediately respond to another inquiry this afternoon, after the op-ed disappeared.
Rivers, however, hasn’t been quiet. He has repeatedly posted to his Twitter account a letter that indicates he had permission—from a lobbyist—to use industry-written material in his op-ed. …
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As the OPEditor, you were aware that “conservative” letter writers often blanket their letters with boilerplate language. There were GOP campaigns set up that way. Which also explains why they all use the phraseology simultaneously.
Lots of plagiarism these days.. the Democratic candidate fur senator in Montana plagiarized a paper he used to get his degree. Pretty much has killed his chances to win.
It’s almost a given that students today cut and paste content. I have found three websites that stole stuff from my technical blog verbatim.
Professors routinely run papers and programs through computer programs to detect plagiarism.
Of course people don’t always write their own op-eds, whether they are pubic officials, organizational representatives or unaffiliated citizen advocates. There are two different kinds of questions that come to mind in these cases.
First, is it an offense against the original author? Is it authorized use of material, or is it stealing another person’s words, plagiarism? The second question is at least equally important. It is whether the signer is thinking for himself or herself about the issue in question? Alternatively, is the signer taking a position articulated by others because it is the easy way out, or because it is their normal job in a leadership position to sign on behalf of an organization, or because it is lucrative?
Let’s not forget good ole Rand Paul, an unrepentant serial plagiarist.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/entire-section-of-rand-pauls-book-copied-verbatim-from-case
And Joe Biden. .
And Martin Luther King
If Corey Hutchins found the source so quickly, then certainly the Post and Courier should have been able to find it as well. It doesn’t look like the type of op-ed that was time sensitive. Oversights happen, and this looks like one of those.
That said, they owe their readers an explanation and full accounting. Simply removing the web page and remaining silent is insufficient, and it’s the kind of behavior that makes the public distrust the media.
Kudos to Corey.
Floodplain and tributary are not vague terms. And I doubt the EPA and Corps of Engineers is regulating puddles.
Apparently, Tyler (or someone with the Democrats) and Corey discovered it independently — although maybe there was a third party who tipped both of them. Tyler brought it to my attention first, then he was surprised when Corey wrote about it.
There is a big difference between a staff-written position op-ed and lifting someone else’s work product.
I had two plagiarism scares myself. In college, I rewrote a paper that I had done for one class and used it in another class. The professors got together and decided that even though the words were different, the themes and concepts were close enough to merit me getting a royal chewing-out.
Then at the newspaper, I did a generic WWII story and listed the Allied countries. I did them in alphabetical order. The copy editor said that alpha order is the way most history books did it, so if we did it that way, I was plagiarizing. So the list ran in inverse alphabetical order.
At my newspaper, we routinely received cut’n’paste “letters” to the editor from political types. This became even more prevalent after the invention of the internet, which gave rise to groupthink. Interestingly, those from “liberals” were individually written or rewritten but contained the salient bullet points, while those from “conservatives” were generally identical documents with different signatures. Our OPEditor mused that the pointy-headed college-educated liberals likely had the fear of plagiarism beaten into them from an early age, while the conservatives didn’t give a @#$%.
Another difference: Conservatives like all-uppercase, capital letters.
Did you get chewed out because you “plagiarized” your own work, or because you failed to develop new thoughts or arguments?
Yeah, repeating yourself doesn’t seem like plagiarism to me. If so, I am definitely guilty. I’ve made the same points over and over and over.
“Then at the newspaper, I did a generic WWII story and listed the Allied countries. I did them in alphabetical order. The copy editor said that alpha order is the way most history books did it, so if we did it that way, I was plagiarizing.”
That’s just silly. I’m don’t think you can plagiarize basic facts.
Can you plagiarize yourself Burl? I never really thought about it. So if you write a paper for a high school English paper then basically just copy the same paper for a college course that would be plagiarism? I guess it would.
I think plagiarism is quoting or closely paraphrasing the words of another without attribution. I could even extend that to novel concepts or trains of thought.
Reusing your own paper might be dirty pool, but isn’t plagiarizing.
you can absolutely self-plagarize if you reuse pieces of a previous published work without citing…
Depends on your definition of plagiarism. Standard dictionary one, you cannot plagiarize yourself. Scholarly definitions vary.
Try re-using a school paper in a different class and see what happens…
Doesn’t mean it’s plagiarism by the dictionary.
We had general policies at The State that, while they weren’t designed to weed out plagiarism, had the effect of avoiding situations such as this one. Their primary purpose was to avoid wasting space, and make sure we were making the most of that finite resource, with relevant material.
We generally turned down unsolicited pieces from local contributors, and especially from unknown outsiders, on national and international issues. We had a perfectly fine stable of syndicated columnists addressing those issues from a variety of points of view. They were professionals, and their material was vetted and edited by other professionals before it got to us. We were paying good money for them. Why take up precious space with a piece that we couldn’t have such confidence in? (The exceptions to this were special cases, and seldom unsolicited. For instance, after the terror attacks in the London Underground, I contacted South Carolinian and former U.S. ambassador to the court of St. James’s Phil Lader to write us a piece for the next day’s paper. Which is the opposite of someone coming to us with no particular credentials wanting to sound off on an international issue.)
We wanted our non-professional contributors to first be local, and then to write about local issues, thereby providing our readers with something special and unique that our syndicated people could not or would not provide. Such pieces took a lot more work on our part, vetting and challenging and editing, but thoughtful pieces on local issues were worth that extra effort.
Also… we were particularly wary of pieces from elected officials in election years. We were mindful that if we ran something from them, we needed to be open to running something from their opponents. And we were choosy about what we’d take from them. The column would need to present a particular, unique perspective on an issue of importance to that person’s district, or addressing some issue key to that particular campaign. (The questions we’d ask ourselves would be, “Why this issue?” and “Is this the right person to be addressing it?”)
A piece from a local lawmaker on a federal issue without anything localizing it or explaining why he had a perspective that made it worth running something from HIM on that issue rather than from another source… well, it would be highly unlikely that something like that would make its way into The State. And that’s without the issue of plagiarism ever coming up….
I guess even “professionals” can become tainted. Remember Armstrong Williams? Here’s an excerpt from the Wiki page on Mr. Williams:
In January 2005, USA Today reported that documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Williams had been paid $240,000 to promote the controversial No Child Left Behind Act. USA Today claimed Williams was hired “to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same”.[9]
As part of the agreement, Williams was required “to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,” and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004″.[10] The contract with Williams was part of a $1 million contract between the U.S. Department of Education and the public relations company, Ketchum Inc.
Melanie Sloan from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told USA Today that the contract may be illegal “because Congress has prohibited propaganda … [A]nd it’s propaganda”. United States Representative George Miller (D-CA), a member of the House Education Committee, called the contract “a very questionable use of taxpayers’ money” that is “probably illegal”.[11]
Yes, I well remember that incident. That’s when I dropped Armstrong from the op-ed page. That was not a pleasant conversation.
And I don’t say this to run Armstrong down or anything, but I don’t really think of him as a professional journalist. He’s sort of a multidirectional entrepreneur, who among his many enterprises managed to get syndicated as a columnist.
I could be wrong about this, but I’m not sure Armstrong ever went through the experiences that an actual journalist goes through before he gets to the point of having a syndicated column. I don’t think he ever had the opportunity to absorb the values that would have kept a professional from doing what he did. I just remember thinking at the time that he just didn’t seem to know better…
I often wondered about a catch phrase I came up with years ago. I called it “the hundred deadly days of summer” . That was a reference to the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day when traffic deaths are at their highest for the year. We used that phrase in many ad campaigns over the next few years. And I’ve seen that in other ad campaigns over the years by other organizations. My concern is two-fold. First, I’m not entirely clear whether “the hundred deadly days of summer” is something I thought up on my own or if it was something I had heard before. I honestly don’t know. But if I had heard it before and simply can’t remember the source is that a type of plagiarism?
On the other hand, if this catch phrase really was my own would later uses of it be a form of plagiarism?
Later uses by others without your permission, yes.