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"Read All About It In The Idler"

23 January 2002

CHAPTERS: The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society

By Peter W. Morgan & Glenn H. Reynolds
 
 

Chapter Five: A Plague of Originality

If the Temple of Science can be desecrated by the Watergate Syndrome, then it should not be surprising that any field of intellectual inquiry could be similarly imperiled. Indeed, many have suffered incursions. One problem can be used to typify many similar issues in academia today, since it touches on most disciplines. The problem is originality.

There would seem to be no ethical standard more obvious or generally accepted than the rule that one should not steal the written work of others.

Yet matters here seem far from clear, despite the frenzied efforts of self-appointed overseers. On the one hand, formal rules against plagiarism grow ever more abundant and ever more stringent (even if no more original), and Op-Ed columnists wax furious in their condemnation of plagiarism by public officials.

On the other hand, many Op-Ed columns are written by individuals other than the one whose name appears on the byline, and for that matter many newspaper stories are more-or-less verbatim versions of press releases sent out by political organizations, trade associations, or other interest groups.

Hardly anyone believes that politicians write their own speeches anymore, and few among the cognoscenti in the legal community believe that Supreme Court justices author their own opinions in more than a supervisory sense.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that some individuals find the subject of plagiarism confusing. Nor is it surprising that some experts have stepped in to say "Sure, you'd never purposely plagiarize someone else's work, but here's how to avoid even the appearance that you did."

Yet the application of appearance rules to plagiarism turns out to raise problems of its own.

A Short History of Plagiarism

Even before the development of written language, poets and bards raided one another's work. As Alexander Lindey notes, Homer based the Iliad and the Odyssey on oral traditions that dated back centuries or more; Aesop's fables were not the work of Aesop, if indeed there ever really was an Aesop. And even after written language became well-established, originality was not at a premium: Aristotle, Socrates, Aristophanes and Plato borrowed heavily from earlier works.

Some of this borrowing went beyond ideas and influence: "Aristotle," Lindey reports, "lifted whole pages from Democritus." And Virgil's Aeneid is lifted heavily from Homer: "If Homer gives a catalogue of an army. . . Virgil draws up his forces in the same order." And Pliny the Elder reported that "I have discovered that some of the most eminent writers have transcribed, word for word, from other works, without acknowledgment."

But although unacknowledged transcription was always disfavored, the classical view of what constituted plagiarism was far different from the modern view. In classical times, originality was not favored. Writing was thought hard enough, and risky enough, that too much striving for originality simply seemed too dangerous: a shortcut to near-certain failure.

Instead writers strove, even consciously, to imitate earlier great works. This should not be confused with simple copying. Simple copying was regarded as wrong:

The term "plagiarism" came from the word plagiarius, which literally meant "kidnapper." It was first used by the poet Martial regarding someone who had "kidnapped" some of his poems by copying them whole and circulating them under the copier's name. But while copying so as to take credit for another's work was wrong, use of another's work to create something of one's own was not. The goal was to take an idea that someone else might have had first, but to improve on it, or its execution.

That a work had obvious parallels with an early work -- even similar passages or phrases -- was a mark of pride, not plagiarism, so long as the overall work could stand on its own. Classical writers were not opposed to originality, they simply had a different (and perhaps more realistic) idea of what constituted originality than do many moderns.

Attacks on this kind of imitation were generally dismissed as motivated by jealousy, pedantry, and propaganda. Imitation was bad only when it was disguised, or a symptom of laziness. It was not denounced simply on grounds of being "unoriginal."

Although grumblers always raised claims of plagiarism, this classical view remained pretty much the standard until fairly recent times. Shakespeare's King Lear was based on a rather similar predecessor, King Leir, but it was not plagiarized.

Many of Shakespeare's contemporaries knew the source of his inspiration, but he was (and is) judged by what he produced rather than what he drew from. Turning the forgotten King Leir into the unforgettable King Lear was an act of creation, even if by modern standards not an entirely original one.

The Romantic Era saw a much greater emphasis on "originality" as a virtue -- originality not merely in the sense of avoiding plagiarism, but in the sense of creating something utterly unlike anything ever created before.

No longer was a writer supposed to build on top of the structures left by earlier figures. Now one was supposed to sweep the ground clear and build from scratch.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be difficult. Even the ancients had complained that all of the good ideas had already been used. By the late 18th and early 19th century, things had not improved. But there was another source of pressure: economics. The development of printing and binding technology, and of copyright law, meant that there was money at stake. As Thomas Mallon notes, "One thing is clear: plagiarism didn't become a truly sore point with writers until they thought of writing as their trade." Once money was involved, people became more vigilant for copying, whether real or imagined.

Still as recently as 1952 the classical view had not been entirely abandoned. That was the year in which Alexander Lindey wrote his Plagiarism and Originality, still in many ways the leading work on the subject. Lindey defined plagiarism this way:

But Lindey also warned that "We must be careful, too . . . not to confuse borrowing with theft. There is a world of difference between the winnowings of a Dante and the outright looting of a Stendahl." And, he cautioned, "every instance of borrowing must be assessed in its time and place. The laws of conscience," he pointed out, "derive from custom." What might be theft in some circumstances might well be permissible borrowing in others. Only a careful review of what was used, how it was used, and what the expectations of the community were can answer the question of plagiarism.

In particular, Lindey warned against a narrow focus on the appearance of similarity between two works, without paying attention to the substantive issues. To assess plagiarism, one must compare the forest, not similarities between the trees.

Although Lindey's view looks more modern than that of, say, Horace, it nonetheless respects many classical notions: that the focus should be on what the alleged plagiarizer has created, as much as on what he or she has taken, and that such issues cannot be resolved by a narrow focus on similarities in language, plot, or structure.

Contrast this with the Modern Language Association's 1975 definition, adopted as the Big Bang was in full explosion. Although that definition starts with the Lindey quote above, it continues in a very different vein:

Like Nixon's concern about the appearance of a coverup, this standard reduces a matter of substance to one of appearances. Despite the Lindey quote, it involves doing exactly what Lindey warned against: comparing isolated similarities rather than comparing whole works.

As K. R. St. Onge comments: "For a term derived from kidnapped and a definition that is supposedly drawing on Lindey's legal experience, the MLA definition extends its application of the term to phrases and thought processes as if a kidnapper could abduct portions of its victim or notions in the victim's head."

The MLA standard might be defended on the ground that it is aimed primarily at students, who are expected not simply to make literary contributions but to demonstrate skills for evaluation. As Lindey said, one must take time and place into account.

But the MLA rule seems as much as anything to be a post-Big Bang application of appearance standards; its adoption in 1975, just after Watergate, may not be coincidental. The MLA standard says that rather than undertaking the hard work of deciding whether a piece is plagiarized based on the kind of substantive evaluation urged by Lindey, we should instead just look for similarities and, if we find them, pronounce guilt.

If it were limited to the clumsy efforts of undergraduate copyists, the MLA standard might be harmless and ultimately unimportant. But on further examination it appears to have marked yet another step away from substance and toward appearances -- a step with impact reaching far beyond the academy, among other places, back into politics to impact (perhaps) the Presidency itself.

Senator Biden's Tale

Plagiarism charges are a staple of entertainment news, of literary litigation, and of academic scandal. The issue of plagiarism seemed to hit a modern high point, however, with Senator Joseph Biden's rather free use of language from a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock. Biden began a speech in Iowa by saying

These lines were very close to those of British Labor Party politician Neil Kinnock, who had said:

Although Biden at first said that he saw nothing wrong with his use of Kinnock's phrases, the scandal forced him to withdraw from the 1988 Presidential race shortly thereafter.

Although one commentator described it as "modest paraphrasing," Biden's use of Kinnock's language was certainly nontrivial, even by the rather loose standards of political campaigning. Columnist William Safire described it as "heavy lifting," but noted that it was hardly unusual in political speech. Safire went on to note that his first reaction to the speech was its clumsiness. "Focused on this particular tree," he said, "I missed the forest of moral outrage that sprang up" in response to Biden's borrowing.

Safire went on to confess that in 1968, as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, he had lifted a phrase from John F. Kennedy that Kennedy had adapted from Adlai Stevenson, and that Stevenson had taken from FDR. "After that speech," he reported, "I felt a little pang of guilt," and so called up the author of FDR's speech to apologize.

The author, Samuel Rosenman, told him that the line came from Robert Ingersoll's 1876 speech nominating James Blaine for President. Concluded Safire, "I never credited Sam Rosenman, and Rosenman never credited the guy who wrote it for Ingersoll; why should the Biden speechwriter give a public pat on the back to the hack who pounds away for Kinnock? The answer is that times have changed; you can't get away with borrowing anything these days."

Times had changed, and the treatment of Biden made that clear. Although there was much hand-wringing over the wrongfulness of Biden's actions, many news stories stressed that the real problem was appearances. Politicians might have stolen from each other since ancient Greece, but as Safire said, times had changed.

The real problem with Biden, we were told "is not the alleged sin but the obvious stupidity." Biden hadn't harmed Kinnock by his borrowing nor was Kinnock's commercial all that original itself. As one observer noted, the Kinnock commercial from which Biden took the language was itself rife with images lifted from John F. Kennedy, and even the "thousand generations" language was said to have come from George Lucas' Star Wars. Nor had Biden deceived his audience: few listeners believe that politicians write their own speeches anyway. At worst, said one expert, "Biden purloined piffle." Yet somehow Senator Biden, alone among politicians who had done the same kind of thing, became widely known as a plagiarist because he borrowed the Kinnock language.

As Professor K. R. St. Onge says, "It is typical of plagiarism charges that often the significance of what was used is totally ignored in favor of the fact that it was used." Plagiarism charges call for careful analysis, and involve substantive issues of propriety, of honesty, and of law. Yet the Biden affair suggests (once again) that the Ethics Establishment is poorly suited for such judgments:

The Biden "standard" -- to the extent that any principle emerged -- was this: do not say anything that anyone has said before, unless what you say is so colorless and unoriginal that no one will think it worth stealing. It is no surprise that our political speech has become so uninspiring, or our electorate so uninspired, under such a standard. Candidates now may be original mostly via gimmicks: a national sales tax, "three strikes" criminal legislation, the death penalty for "drug kingpins," or similar twaddle. So long as you repeat over and over again "The one hope for America is adopting my frozen-yogurt tax credit" you can be sure of avoiding plagiarism. Or candidates may adopt standard politicianspeak, using cliches so dead that everyone (or at least everyone able to remain conscious) knows they are in the public domain.

In none of these cases is the public interest served. It is bad enough when philosophy departments focus on linguistic rules rather than ethics, or when teaching students how to write a research paper has devolved into teaching footnoting at the expense of the quality of students’ arguments. Outside the academic realm, the effects are worse still. When politicians are talking about gimmicks, they are not talking about substantive issues. And politicianspeak doesn't just put voters to sleep: it causes them to disengage from the political process, leaving things all the more open to control by special interest groups whose selfishness provides them enough reason to stay awake. Moral and ethical standards are supposed to serve the broader interests of the community. It is hard to see how the lessons of the Biden affair have done that.

Computer-Aided Absurdity

The Biden standard has, however, quietly metastasized beyond politics into a new academic form. Although many works on plagiarism warn about the danger of simply matching text against text -- G.K. Chesterton warned that "to see the similarities, without seeing the differences, seems. . . a dangerous game" -- such matching became the favored test. Fittingly enough, it fell to the two self-styled scientific "fraudbusters," Walter Stewart and Ned Feder, to carry this to its ad absurdum conclusion.

After their not-entirely-successful effort at policing science fraud, Stewart and Feder branched out into a new business: policing plagiarism. The method that they developed was simple: a computerized text-comparison system. Books, journal articles, dissertations, etc., were scanned and loaded into a database that then compared strings of text until it found matches. Some of these matches were obviously meaningless -- phrases like "on the other hand," or "make haste slowly." For others, however, the meaning was largely in the eye of the beholder. Not surprisingly, Stewart and Feder beheld plagiarism. (Given their involvement with ghostwriting letters for members of Congress, one would have expected more modesty in this context, but the ability of accusers to see motes in others’ eyes while ignoring beams in their own is well documented.) In particular, they became interested in the case of a historian and Abraham Lincoln biographer, Stephen Oates. After scanning in three of Oates' books, they decided to complain to the American History Association, stating that Oates "repeatedly plagiarized the work of other writers," in particular Lincoln biographer Benjamin P. Thomas.

At one level, their argument seemed well-founded: it had come from the dispassionate comparison of texts by a computer, after all, leaving no room for human prejudices. Of course, that comparison also left no room for human judgment. According to one news account

The overlap in language is there, but it is not great. The overlap in ideas is great, but the idea is trivial: a carriage ride. Is this plagiarism? Stewart and Feder, of course, thought so. Others disagreed. Oates responded that the repetition of short phrases does not constitute plagiarism, and pointed out that a 1987 article by Stewart and Feder in Nature repeated phrases from other works in a similar fashion. Oates quoted Lindey: "Parallels are too readily susceptible of manipulation. Superficial resemblances may be made to appear as of the essence."

Although Oates was not a member of the American Historical Association, that association's Professional Division nonetheless reviewed the charges and produced a report that said Oates' work was "derivative to a degree requiring greater acknowledgement" but that did not find him guilty of plagiarism. Historians who spoke publicly on the subject were divided. According to one, Prof. John Simon of Southern Illinois University, Oates was treated unfairly. "He wrote popular biographies, interpretative biographies in which, so far as I know, the claims to scholarship were modest enough." Another historian, Robert Bruce at Boston University, said, "It sounds to me as if it's plagiarism, but they decided not to call it that." Still another, James McPherson of Princeton, said "I would say the weight of it lies toward an exoneration of Oates." Afterward, Oates complained to Congress and to Stewart and Feder's employer, the National Institutes of Health, arguing that government employees should not be paid to undertake free-lance investigations of citizens. Stewart and Feder were reassigned other duties of a largely clerical nature.

Was Oates guilty of plagiarism?

Probably not. As Lindey notes, in parallelism cases, "the technique for the presentation of findings is fairly standard. . . . You take excerpts from the supposedly offending work, and corresponding ones from the alleged source, and you put them one below the other, or -- more effective still -- side by side. You see to it that both the selection and the arrangement underscore the resemblances. You make no mention of any differences unless you have to." This is, of course, exactly what the Stewart/Feder plagiarism computer was programmed to do. The problem, however, is that "[t]he technique makes a weak case look strong" because "[m]ost parallels rest on the assumption that if two successive things are similar, the second one was copied from the first. This assumption disregards all the other possible causes of similarity." Stewart and Feder had taken the MLA definition to its logical extreme, virtually eliminating judgment and reflection from the process. Not surprisingly, the results were poor. This was the Biden standard writ large. It was, in essence, an appearance standard, sharing all the vices of appearance standards in general.

In fact, the standard applied to Biden embodies both of the Blifil paradoxes. Petty Blifil was triggered by John Sasso, the Dukakis campaign manager who sent the "attack video" containing both the Kinnock commercial and the Biden speech to several news organizations. Sasso's goal was to destroy Biden's candidacy in order to further that of his boss, Massachussetts governor Michael Dukakis. A shrewd political operative, Sasso knew that the press and the commentators would focus on appearances rather than substance. He was right. A standard that can be manipulated in such a fashion, for such self-serving reasons, embodies Petty Blifil.

But the Biden furor also illustrated Grand Blifil, for the standard applied to Biden was one that left room for many things that debase the political process far more than the impropriety it forbids. Not everyone missed that point at the time. As columnist Edwin Yoder wrote:

As Yoder noted, the decay of political discourse meant that not only could voters no longer rely on political figures' words being their own, they could no longer even be certain that the words reflected the candidates' views. Instead, "all this hand-me-down stuff is no more a reflection of the speaker's character than a play script is of an actor's. It is calculated to sound the cliches of the hour, to create an effect, to manipulate emotions. . . . Far from being inspiring, it is not far short of political decadence." Yoder wrote before the largely idea-free 1996 presidential campaign, but his words have only gained in force with the passage of time.

Ironically, just as Stewart and Feder’s computer, coupled with an astonishing lack of backbone among the academic committees who became involved, was establishing far too high a standard for originality in the academic world, commercial book-publishing was going the other way. The commercial world was routinely suppressing the author credit on behalf of a different appearance ethic. Take a stroll through the nonfiction section of your neighborhood bookstore and see how many of the books display the photo of a celebrity author on the front. Few of these books were authored by the individual on the cover. They were instead written by ghostwriters who receive little or no credit.

Who is being deceived by this? Not the publisher, of course. And not the (real) author. Just the reader, who may actually believe that he or she has purchased a book that offers a glimpse into the mind of the putative author. Yet books ranging from Lee Iacocca’s bestselling autobiography, to the campaign memoirs of Robert and Elizabeth Dole, to Hillary Clinton’s book of moral instruction It Takes a Village, were the product of unacknowledged ghostwriters.

As Charles Krauthammer writes, "If lying about authorship is now a hanging offense, there are not enough lampposts in Washington to handle the volume." A strange legacy of the Biden affair.

Motes and Beams

Yet in fact the problem goes beyond the worlds of celebrity book-publishing and political ghostwriting that Yoder and Krauthammer describe.

Those who followed the uproar of Senator Biden’s speech, or for that matter the more recent flap over Joe Klein’s false denial of authorship with regard to the novel Primary Colors, might have been surprised to know how little of the content in their daily newspaper or newscast actually originated with the producers and editors.

News stories, to a degree seldom appreciated by the general public, are often the product of press releases generated by trade associations and interest groups. Often those releases are converted into news stories by the simple expedient of placing a reporter's byline on top. Television news stories (especially those appearing on local stations) are often supplied fully produced, with blank spots left for the local news reporter to insert commentary that makes the story appear his or her own. Opinion columns are often "placed" by businesses or interest groups to support a particular point of view -- often, they are even written by those groups and then run with the byline of distinguished individuals, or even regular commentators, who have barely read the piece, much less written it. Indeed, the Sasso "attack video" was something of this sort, for the journalists who broke the Biden/Kinnock story did not at first disclose their source.

Most readers and viewers have small appreciation of how little of what they see on television or read in newspapers and magazines is original with the reporters, editors, and producers involved. Yet in fact news organizations are highly dependent on predigested information from public relations firms, government officials, and advocacy groups, information that is often passed on to their readers and viewers with no indication that it is not original. That problem is not new, but it has gotten worse in recent years.

Thirty-five years ago Daniel Boorstin wrote of what he called "pseudo-events," and noted that much of what passes for news is actually made up of items manufactured by public relations flacks and distributed to the public by way of news organizations. The news organizations, he wrote, go along with this sort of thing out of a need for material, and out of laziness: it's just easier to take predigested material and reprint it than it is to come up with real news. In tones of dismay, Boorstin reported that the National Press Club in Washington was equipped with racks holding the handouts from press conferences throughout the capital, in order to save the reporters the trouble of actually attending. As Boorstin went on to note:

The practice Boorstin described has not gone away: it has expanded into new frontiers. Technology in the early 1960s was primitive, and favored live or minimally-produced television news; as a result, that medium acquired a reputation for realism and immediacy that print reporting lacked. A print story could be made up, but an image on television was real. But nowadays, when many high schools have network-quality television studios, and when videotape is sold at convenience stores, that has changed. Although a "video news release" is still more expensive to produce than a standard paper press release, they have become much more common. According to a recent poll, seventy-five percent of TV news directors reported using video news releases at least once per day.

These releases, with their high quality images and slick production, are produced by companies and groups who want to get their message across, but don't want simply to purchase advertising time. They are designed so that television producers at local stations or (less often) major networks, can simply intersperse shots of their own reporters or anchors (often reading scripted lines provided with the release) to give the impression that the story is their own. Their use has been the subject of considerable controversy within the journalistic profession, although some commentators have claimed that they are used no more often, or misleadingly, than written press releases are used by the print media.

A recent scandal in Britain involved network use of a video news release produced by the group Greenpeace that some considered misleading. But of course for every video news release, or VNR as they are called in the trade, that comes from an environmental group there are hundreds that come from businesses or government organizations. Though a keen eye can usually spot a VNR (hint: the subject matter wouldn't otherwise be news, and it usually involves experts and locales far from the station that airs it) most viewers probably believe that today’s story on cell-phone safety or miracle bras is just another product of the news program's producers – and hence, implicitly backed by the news people’s public commitment to objective journalism. The truth, however, is different.

It is fair to say that the wholesale use of others' work is a major part of modern journalism. But news officials are quick to distinguish that from plagiarism. In a mini-scandal at the San Diego Tribune, a reporter's story was cancelled when editors noticed that it looked very much like a story that had already appeared elsewhere. At first, presumably, it was thought that the story had been taken from the other publication. Then it turned out that both stories were simply near-verbatim versions of a press release. According to the Tribune's deputy editor, that wasn't plagiarism. "If you look up the definition of plagiarism, it is the unauthorized use of someone's material. When someone sends you a press packet, you're entitled to use everything in there."

Certainly this statement seems to capture the attitude of many in the journalistic professions. One public-relations handbook explains it this way:

An experiment by a group of journalism students at the University of Tennessee demonstrates just how willing reporters can be to accept facts and story ideas that involve little work. The students concocted a fictitious press release from a group opposing "political correctness" and mailed it to a number of newspapers. Most did not run it, but quite a few did -- and none checked the details one way or another. One newspaper even embellished the story with additional details that were not included in the original press release. When word of the experiment got out, journalists were predictably outraged, with one even saying that it violated the bond of trust (!) between journalists and public-relations professionals. A more likely explanation for the outrage is that the experiment uncovered a pattern of shoddy work that its practitioners would have preferred to keep unexposed. Not plagiarism, perhaps, but something that in many ways is worse.

In Oates’s case, all of his similarly worded passages were trivial. Readers may not have had any idea of the similarity, but the "deception," if it can be called that, was of no account. In Biden's case, obviously self-interested political speech turned out not to be original. Again, voters were not deceived in any meaningful way. But in the cases described above, self-interested speech masquerades -- sometimes with the active connivance of journalists and editorial-page editors -- as neutral reportage or independent commentary. Which is more likely to deceive its audience? Obviously the latter. Yet the same investigative journalists and pundits who pilloried Senator Biden have little to say about offenses this close to home. Grand Blifil indeed.

There is something wrong with this picture. From the world of science to the world of politics, there has been an eagerness to address ethical issues in terms of appearances. And across the board the results have been poor. Appearance standards are readily manipulated by the unscrupulous, as in the Baltimore and Biden cases, or by the self-important, as in the Oates case. And although adopted in the name of increased sensitivity to ethics, they tend to draw attention away from sins worse than they condemn. And the end result is seldom increased public respect, even though the need to maintain such respect is always given as a justification for judging by appearances.

In fact, appearance ethics not only fail to foster better behavior in those they govern, they also undermine the behavior of those who apply them. One of the chief appeals of appearance ethics to its enforcers (who include the corps of press and commentators) is that – much like reprinting press releases as news – judging appearances requires little knowledge of substance, allowing one to discuss the issues without the need for bothersome research or thought. Classical thinkers on ethical matters had a term for this tendency to avoid hard work. It was called laziness, and it was not considered a virtue. Another appeal of appearance ethics is that it provides something to talk about: when appearance ethics are the rule, even an unsubstantiated accusation can be said to create a bad appearance. Thus, even an unsubstantiated accusation provides grist for the mill of news flashes, op-eds, and talking-head shows.

The classical term for this sort of behavior was malicious gossip and it, too, was not considered a virtue. This powerful appetite for accusations based on appearances itself encourages bad behavior: when the prevailing attitude is "where there’s smoke there’s fire" we should not be surprised to find a brisk trade in smudge-pots. This was known as temptation.

That all of these human characteristics exist should come as no surprise. That they exist, by design, in an area dedicated to the improvement of ethics would have surprised classical thinkers. We should be concerned that it goes unremarked today.
 
Glenn Reynolds writes: This is republished with the permission of my publisher, Simon and Schuster's The Free Press. However, they couldn't find an electronic version of the chapter (yeah, I know) so what's posted is not quite the final version. Only the printed version is canonical. In particular, we list Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village as having been ghostwritten. The good folks at her publisher (which, er, happens to be the same one) swore up and down that her book was not ghostwritten, despite many media claims that it was, and that phrase was removed from the final version. Who do I believe? I'd rather not say. Note this prophetic quote from Charles Krauthammer: "If lying about authorship is now a hanging offense, there are not enough lampposts in Washington to handle the volume." Judging by what The Weekly Standard has stirred up, we may soon find out if this is true.