Plagiarism is a deadly cancer that has slain many people in the world.
Take a picture of a student who delivers a ‘first class thesis’ that no one knows is purely plagiarised. Look at another case of a prominent world orator who delivers a speech that was lifted from the internet.
Usually, when plagiarism is discovered, the person implicated is embarrassed and the case portrays him as lazy, dishonest and lacking integrity.
Here are classic examples of high profile plagiarisms.
If you thought Melania Trump’s speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention Monday night sounded a bit familiar, it’s probably because you heard Michelle Obama say some of the exact same statements back in 2008.
Reporters on Twitter quickly discovered that an entire paragraph of Trump’s speech was the same, almost verbatim, to Obama’s first Democratic National Convention speech. The Trump campaign has denied that the speech was plagiarized, while RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said he’d fire the speechwriter who copied Obama’s speech. (Others have made less…coherent arguments.)
While it seems extraordinary that a high-profile campaign like Trump’s would not have vetted Melania’s speech, Kelly McBride, a media ethicist on the faculty of the Poynter Institute, says there is no doubt Trump repeated Obama’s speech without attribution.
“Politicians have ghost writers and speech writers all the time, that’s not an unacceptable practice, but if your name is going on the words, you have the ultimate responsibility for how they’re crafted,” says McBride.
Here are some other notable examples of plagiarism over the years.
Joe Biden
Back in 1987, now Vice President Joe Biden’s then-presidential campaign was derailed when a case of plagiarism from his law school days was rediscovered amid allegations that he was “using material from others’ speeches without attribution.”
According to the New York Times, Biden’s college record, which he released to the public, stated that he had “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” in an article he wrote for the Fordham Law Review.
Biden was also accused of plagiarizing a speech made by Neil Kinnock, the then-leader of the U.K. Labor Party. Biden dropped out of the race as a result.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King’s greatness needs no explanation or introduction.
In the 50s and 60s his leadership in the civil rights movement not only won King a Nobel Peace Prize but also helped bring about radical change in the United States. His iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is still remembered as one of the most powerful and important speeches in U.S. history.
His mark on American history runs deep and he continues to inspire others today to fight injustice and push for equality for all.
The Plagiarism
King’s most prominent run-in with plagiarism took place in 1955. In support of his doctorate at Boston University, King turned in a dissertation entitled, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” He was able to successfully defend his dissertation and went on to receive his degree.
However, after his wife donated King’s papers to the Stanford University King Papers Project, the group organizing the papers learned that portions of his earlier writings, including his doctoral thesis, were taken from other authors. Ralph Lurker, a historian who worked on the project said that, as King continued with his academic career the attribution issues became more “deeply ingrained” and were a “long-established practice” by the time he wrote his dissertation.
Allegations have also been levied at some of his later works, including his “I have a Dream” speech”, which was allegedly stolen from another pastor, Archibald Carey. However, the similarities between the two works, is very limited and is explained by both speeches pulling form an earlier work, namely Samuel Francis Smith’s hymn “America”.
In the end, though, Boston University did investigate the allegations of plagiarism and, in 1991, found that King’s dissertation did contain plagiarism. However, while the school appended a note to the dissertation, it declined to revoke his degree saying that the dissertation, despite its shortcomings, still contributed to the field.
Aftermath
The allegations of plagiarism only came about decades after his death. By then, he was (rightfully) already a national hero. While the plagiarism allegations have become a footnote, they haven’t drastically changed the views people have about King or his legacy.
This makes sense because King’s accomplishments were outside of academia. As Lurker said in his article, if King had chosen a different career path, his plagiarism could have posed a much larger problem. But as a civil rights leader, King’s plagiarism is an unwanted footnote overshadowed by greater accompaniments.
Jayson Blair
Jayson Blair was a reporter for the New York Times who enjoyed a quick career ascendency, landing a full time job at the country’s most prestigious paper after a few internships, according to the Society for Professional Journalists. Blair was soon assigned to the national news desk and covered high profile events, like the war in Iraq, where questions about the authenticity of his work soon surfaced.
After an investigation by the Times, it was revealed that Blair had fabricated sources, quotes, events, and more for a series of articles on military families, as well as lied about where his “reporting” took place. His case is one of the most notorious examples of plagiarism in the modern journalistic era.
“The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” reads the Times‘ report of the incident. At the time the report was written, the Times had found problems in half of the articles Blair had written for the paper.
Katie Couric
In 2007, Katie Couric was in the middle of a plagiarism scandal at CBS News, when a web producer who was hired to write blog posts for Couric copied a column written by Jeffrey Zaslow for the Wall Street Journal.
While Couric herself didn’t crib Zaslow’s writing, the case raised questions about why Couric couldn’t write her own personal columns, and how authentic her blog posts were after all. Bob Steele, the director of ethics in journalism at the Poynter Institute at the time, said fault for the plagiarism lied with both Couric and the producer.
“The journalist whose name is on it is still responsible,” Steele told ABC.
Alex Haley
While Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Roots remains one of the most enduring works in African American literature, the author would later admit that parts of the book were in fact copied from a white author.
Harold Courlander pursued a lawsuit claiming that Haley had plagiarized parts of Roots from his book The African, which was published in 1967. The court found that Haley had copied ideas, names, and direct passages from Courlander’s work. Haley admitted the deceit, but maintained that it had happened unintentionally. He settled with Courlander out of court.
Jonah Lehrer
Another famous media plagiarist, Jonah Lehrer was a writer for the New Yorker before it was found that he often reused material he wrote for other publications and completely fabricated content—including quotes he attributed to Bob Dylan in his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.
Lehrer admitted to copying material and resigned from the New Yorker in 2012. An independent analysis of his work for Wired found that he committed the same journalistic sins there as well.
Incidentally, Lehrer just published a new work, A Book About Love. It has not received good reviews.
Fareed Zakaria
Fareed Zakaria, a journalist at CNN, the Washington Post (and once an editor-at-large at MONEY’s sister publication Time), experienced much publicized accusations of “serial plagiarism” in 2014. Two watchdog organizations found that Zakaria often used passages from others’ work in books, articles, and on his show without proper attribution.
Zakaria claimed that he simply restated facts and statistics, and did not use other authors’ opinions or expressions without attribution. But as media critic Dylan Byers wrote at the time: