Last Sunday we printed an op-ed from Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway about a water storage project in northern Colorado.
Two days earlier, on the day our Perspective section was being printed, the Greeley Tribune printed a column that was nearly identical to Conway’s. Entire passages were exactly the same. But the author was Doug Rademacher, chairman of the Weld County Commissioners.
State Rep. B.J. Nikkel “authored” almost the exact same piece, nearly word for word, in the Loveland Reporter-Herald and Berthoud Recorder. It also was later printed in the Windsor Beacon.
Plagiarism? It’s unclear.
Unethical? Yes.
Misleading? Definitely.
As revelations of plagiarism were rocking Scott McInnis’ gubernatorial campaign last week, Gary Wockner of Save the Poudre, a group fighting the proposed water storage project, issued a press release outlining the vast similarities in the columns and asked: “Who actually wrote the editorial? How much did they get paid to write it?”
Good questions.
I contacted Conway, who told me he wrote the column. He did his own research and writing, and it took him upwards of eight hours to do it.
And when he e-mailed it to me on July 5, he was offering an original piece that was exclusive to The Post, which follows our guidelines. He did not get paid.
Yet he also shared it with other elected leaders, who he had been working with to generate publicity for a rally in support of the water project. He says he invited them to use whatever parts of his column they wanted.
Basically, they lifted the entire column and presented it as their own.
Is that plagiarism? It’s murky, given that Conway willingly shared his material. But one expert, speaking on a different matter, told The Post last week that presenting previously published work as your own is plagiarism.
It definitely misleads readers, which is very concerning. Readers of those other publications were led to believe they were reading the words and thoughts of those authors.
It’s not unusual for politicians, especially high-profile ones, to have ghostwriters. In fact, it’s common for senators, congressmen and governors.
No one ever really admits up front that the politician didn’t pen the op-ed, but their press guys will say something like: “The column is ready to go. We just need to get the congressman to sign off on it.”
Sign off on it? Didn’t he write it?
During the presidential contest, we asked each campaign to have surrogates write a column for us on why their candidate would be best on particular issues.
The first week, John McCain’s camp had former Gov. Bill Owens pen something for us. But Barack Obama’s campaign sent us a column written by Barack Obama.
Now, in the final days of the campaign, do you suppose Barack Obama was up late madly typing his Denver Post column?
Don’t count on it.
McInnis last week told me that when he was in Congress, staffers wrote his bills. And, I’m sure, most of his speeches.
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City speech last week was mostly written by staffers, but he went through it, made additions and subtractions, and put his personality and personal touch in it. But it wasn’t solely his.
That’s just the way it works.
Should we expect more from our elected leaders? Should we demand that politicians write their own columns? And if so, how would we know that they did?
Maybe part of the problem is that the line between ghostwriting and lifting or sharing material has been blurred.
Regardless, this should be a cautionary tale for public officials who try to pass off others’ work as their own. Just ask McInnis how that works out.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter at .
