Right now, the presidential primaries are providing our English class with perfect plagiarism fodder. Barack Obama has been accused of plagiarizing his friend, and the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Upon first listen, yes, the two speeches are startlingly similar. To me, however, this is not a case of plagiarism, due to two main factors: intent and common knowledge.
As a student living in fear of plagiarism, intent is one of the most important qualifiers to me in defining plagiarism. There are numerous, university-defined ways in which one can be accused of plagiarism without even being aware of it. For example, I could independently come up with an idea that someone in my class has already thought of. If I write my paper and they come across as too similar, no matter how independently written, it can be deemed plagiarism. The fact that I did not intend to plagiarize holds no importance. We are students and we’re bound to make mistakes in citation—whether simply forgetting, accidentally removing, or incorrectly formatting our citations. These should be teaching and learning opportunities, not failures or expulsions. This same principle can be applied to Barack Obama. He has told the media that he did not mean to plagiarize and knowing what a big deal the media has made of this, he would have cited Patrick in his speech. I think that Obama only acquiesced to “apologize” and say he should have cited Patrick to quiet the ridiculous media coverage. I argue that what Barack Obama said is not plagiarism, simply common knowledge that does not need to be cited.
There are a few famous presidential quotes that almost every citizen of the United States of America knows. FDR’s “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream,” and even lines from the Declaration of Independence. I believe that everyone has heard these lines so frequently over the course of there lives that many would not even know to whom to attribute them. When anyone thinks of famous American quotes, these are always the first on the list. The fact that Barack Obama used these exact same quotes as another man in a speech is coincidental but not very unlikely considering the subject matter. Politics uses the same rhetoric ad nauseum, and I doubt this will be the first or the last “plagiarism” issue the media brings up in the coming months. To me, Obama didn’t plagiarize and thus does not need to apologize for his lack of citation. Granted, I am an Obama supporter, but even Fox News’ conservative anchor, Bill O’Reilly agrees with me —what do you think? Did Obama plagiarize? What’s the “punishment” in high profile cases?
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3 comments:
I agree with you that intent is important in determining plagiarism. In fact I said the same thing in my post as well. However, hearing what others had to say about it made me realize it could be hard to determine whether someone intentionally plagiarized or not.
Intent is important when determining whether or not the case is plagiarism but Obama didn't just use the quotes we all know so very well. After each quote he said, "just words" and Deval Patrick was the one who originally stated each quote with "just words" following. That is clearly plagiarism. The speech was strong and the way in which he presented it was great, but he could have easily but a different spin on it or at least credited Patrick. I think with a "high" status such as his, plagiarism "scandals" are only dealt with the media bashing for a couple days and is over withing 72 hours of the incident, it's how it is and I don't think any more punishment will ever be administered.
I don't know about you guys, but I didn't get the course syllabus at the beginning of election season outlining...wait, what? There's no syllabus outlining the what constitutes plagiarism in the Presidential election.
That's right, no one said that these were Obama's or Hillary's ideas (John McCain doesn't plagiarize, he waits) but they use them anyways because they are, wait for it, GOOD IDEAS (atleast for their campaign. I'm not committing to one candidate yet, not until Johnny McCain decides on whether or not he's gonna hop on a fighter jet and end the war in Iraq)Anyways, outside of school you're really left in the court of public opinion as far a plagiarism goes, and in a case like this it's silly to bust a dude who's been campaigning for the last couple months because his material wasn't fresh enough.
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