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March 26, 2010 04:10 PM UTC

Norton's unexamined plagiarism

  • 52 Comments
  • by: Jason Salzman

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

I’m supposed to be watching the media, but Denver Post reporter Lynn Bartels puts me to shame.

She can not only “half listen” to CNN from the “other room” but, at the same time, hear someone saying something on CNN that Jane Norton also said during a speech over six months ago.

As she reported on The Post’s blog, The Spot, Bartels heard Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) use a quotation that came from Norton’s mouth when Norton launched her senatorial campaign Sept. 15.

But there was one big difference. Rodgers properly attributed the quotation to former President Gerald Ford.

And Norton did not.

Norton said, “I believe a government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government that’s big enough to take everything you have.”

Ford said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Bartels’ discovery of this was pretty impressive, but her blog post didn’t offer any information on whether this is plagiarism on Norton’s part. In fact, the P word wasn’t used.

Journalists should take plagiarism ultra seriously, right, since some of them get fired for doing it. Not to mention the fact that “plagiarist” isn’t a skill we’re looking for in our future elected officials.

So I emailed a leading poobah in field of journalism ethics, Robert Steele, to find out whether Norton’s apparent act of plagiarism should, in fact, be considered plagiarism and what would happen to a journalist who did what Norton did.

Prof. Steele is the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute and the Director of the Jane Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

Here’s what he wrote:

If one uses a common understanding of plagiarism — using the specific words or nearly exact thoughts of someone else and claiming them as your original writing or thoughts — then Norton’s use of this quote falls into that category.

My guess is that many politicians have used a variation of this phrase over the years to capture an ideological position about the role of government in our society. If Norton had just taken the broad concept and stated it in her own words, she might have been OK. For instance, if she said something like, “A government that gives can take. We should be wary of big government that promises too much and makes us pay back all we receive,” she would have made her point (albeit with a less resounding quote) and avoided the plagiarism trap.

Given her use of the exact wording, Norton should have attributed the phrase to Ford (assuming he was the originator of the phrase and didn’t borrow it himself from someone else).

If a journalist used this same exact phrase without attribution, I would want to know how it happened. I would ask the journalist how and why she/he used that phrase and why it wasn’t attributed. I would also check other work produced by that journalist to see if there are other problems with attribution. I would discipline the journalist based on the extent and reason for the failure in this case and whether the journalist has a history of plagiarism. That discipline could range from a serious reprimand to a suspension to dismissal.

In this case, I would ask Norton some questions. How did this happen? Did you write this speech? If so, where did you get that line? If not, who wrote the speech and/or that line? Perhaps one of her speech writers did this. Norton, as the person who used the words is still primarily responsible, of course. I would also do some plagiarism checking of her other speeches to see if this is a recurring problem.

I made certain that Steele saw that Norton’s words weren’t exactly the same as Ford’s.

“Norton’s words are very, very close to the exact wording of the Ford quote and her expression of this thought is almost verbatim to Ford’s expression,” he wrote back.  “Norton should have attributed the statement to Ford. By not doing so, she claimed it as her original thought. That’s wrong.”

Even if you don’t agree with Steele, you’d still want to hear more from Norton about the Ford quote, given that she wants to be Colorado’s U.S. Senator.

Reporters should follow up with her, along the lines Steele suggests: How did this happen? Has it happened before? What have you done to stop it from happening again?

A politician can commit plagiarism and be forgiven, perhaps more easily than a professional writer. Look at Joe Biden.

But it’s up to reporters to take Norton’s transgression much more seriously. Get all the facts on the table, and let us decide.

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52 thoughts on “Norton’s unexamined plagiarism”

  1. You’ve got one sentence expressing pretty much the core belief of the modern Republican Party here. It’s not at all the same as Biden, so I’m not sure that comparison just thrown in there without context is fair.

    A better and more interesting question might have been, when does a phrase expressing a widely shared sentiment enter a sort of political public domain. Because if that’s not an option, there are a LOT of politicians ripping off the author of “God bless America.”

    1. What Ms. Norton said is very close to the exact words of President Ford but I’ve heard politicians using that concept over and over again for three decades now without attributing it to our former President, and until this came up if someone would have asked me I would not have remembered that President Ford said it first. This is one of those statements that has become so ingrained in our political lexicon that everyone uses it. Perhaps she should have acknowledged President Ford but this seems like a trivial point to make. If Ms. Norton had plagarized whole paragraphs or pages of someone’s speech then this would be a serious matter but she didn’t.

      Also, Ms. Norton does not have a history of plagarism.

      Finally, for all we know, her notes for her speech or written text contained an attribution and she forgot to mention President Ford. This may be just an honset mistake.

      We shouldn’t dwell on this any longer.

      1. Most every trite statement that can be said in politics, has been said in politics. Should they end each sentance with who it is attributed to?

        I’d say you need to give attribution when you present major concepts and you are using a couple of paragraphs from the person who first put it together.

        1. That’s not the standard, David. The Ford line is sufficiently complex a formulation to attribute it if you’re actually picking it up from Ford.

          What I argued above (or brought up, I didn’t actually argue it), though, is that that sentiment has been expressed so many times over three decades it’s become a core principle of the Republican Party and has entered the public domain. I would really doubt Norton’s speech writer was perusing old transcripts of Gerald Ford speeches looking for gems, but rather just plucked a phrase out of the conservative zeitgeist.

          It is certainly possible to lift (or plagiarize) a sentence, but it’s hard to argue that’s what happened here without an academic stick up your ass, or a partisan motive to find someone so situated.

    3. Plagiarism didn’t dent Janet Rowland much, even when she did it in a newspaper article while she was an elected official.

      If that’s all the Dems have on Norton, it’s going to be a pretty boring campaign.

      1. “If that’s all the Dems have on Norton” assumes this even amounts to anything. I don’t think it does under any standard, and it’s sad that Pols has had this at the top of the site all morning because most visitors are just going to read the headline.

    5. I’m with you on this one big guy.

      There is nothing new about a Republican recycling old stale talking points as their own.  It just shows a complete lack of originality or common courtesy on the part of the speaker which coupled with the fact that she is an ardent Republican extremist makes it completely unnewsworthy.  They do it all the time and I doubt she is the stalest of the stale although she might compete for most lacking in original thought which come to think of it should disqualify her from high elective office.

      We need Libertad/Twinkie to come up with one of his cute Internet videos of someone crying and saying “Leave Jane Norton alone”.

    7. I’ve seen people say “ZZZZZZZZZ” before. Who are you quoting here?

      But seriously, I agree that it’s a silly sort of issue, except that Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign in 1988 was derailed for something pretty similar. The quote Norton used is common enough knowledge, although it’s been frequently attributed to Thomas Jefferson of all people, not Ford. That’s the only reason one should be somewhat careful.

      I’m not sure whether a Republican misattributing a trite quote is better or worse than a Republican completely failing to attribute a trite quote.

      If only Republicans had something other than trite quotes to offer, this might not be an issue at all.

      1. Not really that similar. Biden’s appropriation of Kinnock’s speech was both more extensive and knowing — he attributed the story to Kinnock most of the time but didn’t sometimes, and that’s what he got in trouble for. It wasn’t just one bromide of a phrase, either.

        1. Never understood what the big deal with that was.

          And so wait, stupid people get a pass? Norton couldn’t possibly have known how to attribute a famous quote?

          1. I would wonder whether Norton knew it was a “famous quote” or just a talking point she’d been hearing for decades. I don’t wonder to the point of demanding reporters track this down! But there’s that difference between Norton and Biden too.

  3. Norton keeps on giving, she’s so generous.

    So, will the Republicans take a look at their process after a third electoral disaster?

    And of course, I know the basic thinking of the Ford quote is standard boilerplate stuff, but when will they realize how annoying it is to the rest of the electorate?

  4. This is not a front page story.  This is almost as trivial as his last expose on a certain candidate’s mustache.

    With all the interesting and important events of this past month Salzman chooses to write about facial hair, and politicans using eachothers widely repeated slogans.  

    Could we lay off all the petty crap please?

  5. JFK’s “Ask not…” was his prep school motto, for which he replaced “your school” with “your country”. Churchill ripped of John Maynard Keynes when he said “Americans will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.” (Keynes had send “men” instead of “Americans”). In our Declaration of Independence, famously, Jefferson ripped off Locke’s “Life, Liberty, and Property” to form the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And, as JeffcoTodd pointed out to me, the quote about the arc of history attributed to MLK actually belongs, in slightly different version, to a religious scholar of an earlier epoch.

    I’ve seen my own ideas cribbed at various times during my academic career, often somthing said in informal discussions appearing uncredited in a presentation or paper. It always kind of bothered me (I consider it poor form not to credit the originator of an idea when the originator is known), but, then again, that’s really the nature of memes.

    2. viable and successful running mate, now Vice President of the United states.  How much less of a factor is this little bit of not much going to influence Norton’s run?  You kind of help make the majority point here. Yaaawwn…

        1. what I see is a sharp and cool-headed recovery from a very dumb slip-up that anyone could have made.

          Instead of getting flustered, he turned it into “you’re making everyone else stand up,” and just emphasized honoring the guy more than he had intended to.

          When you put someone on the record practically 24/7, with cameras and microphones constantly in their face, very few people, even among the most talented, are so talented that they aren’t caught saying incredibly stupid things from time to time. Some, who are either looser (as in Biden’s case) or stupider (as in Dan Quayle’s case) than most others operating at their level, are caught saying stupid things more often than others, and so get an enormous, inflated reputation for it.

          And I said the same thing throughout the George H.W. Bush administration about Dan Quayle; that his alleged “stupidity” was exaggerated by having every moment of misspeaking amplified by the combination of the constant media eye on him as a public figure and his growing reputation for stupidity (creating a self-reinforcing media feedback loop of sorts).

  8. she doesn’t have anything original or thoughtful to add. So, if she were to say something that seemed informed, knowledgeable or thoughtful I would immediately suspect it’s origin.

  9. Can we find an academic expert (or local media critic) to go nuts over this phrase in a release Doug Lamborn just sent out?

    I have only just begun to fight.

    It’s awfully close to the famous John Paul Jones phrase, but it’s actually closer to an FDR campaign theme, a phrase Newt Gingrich has been using recently, and is a direct quotation from song lyrics by a Belgian singer who goes by the name Natalia.

    Reporters should follow up with Lamborn on this. How did this happen? Has it happened before? What has he done to stop this from happening again? Does Doug Lamborn have Belgian pop music on his iPod?

    1. Ritter taking credit (and getting credit from all sorts) for “coining” the phrase New Energy Economy? The phrase was in fairly widespread use for years before Ritter uttered it. Did he “plagiarize” it? No, but I don’t see Jason jumping up and down wondering why reporters don’t investigate.

  12. write the line Norton used without attribution. Yet, none has bothered to ask her about it. That’s an embarrassment.

    The guy I quoted, Steele, is one of the leading experts in the country on this issue.

    Sorry I didn’t respond earlier. I was away today.  

    1. A non-event.  Whether you were here or not, it would still be bullshit, so being away isn’t really important.

      You can put up any expert you want to argue with me that the November election won’t be about plagiarism, real or invented.

      Wanna win in November?  Write about real issues.  There are plenty of them.  And they affect Real People.  You know, voters.

      1. The reference to Ritter above about the New Energy Economy is a slogan.  Norton used a quote without attribution which makes the audience think that it is her wisdom. That is essentially fraud in the inducement when it comes to soliciting votes.  She is ascribing wisdom to herself that she does not possess.  Obviously it isn’t going to make or break her election chances but it does show a lack of respect for her audience and a willingness to forget about details which could be trouble in a person in high office (e.g. Alberto Gonzales).  She could have said something like “The late Gerald Ford said …” and she would have recognized the individual and aligned herself with his thinking which would have been appropriate.  

        To use the quote without attribution is probably small potatoes to you but it definitely shows she is OK with hoodwinking her audiences which in a democracy the press has a duty to call to light.

        If you are offended that Jason pointed out the obvious then you probably don’t like lawyers who defend Guantanamo Bay prisoners.  Sometimes people feel a responsibility to do their jobs even when they are scorned for doing it.

      2. without attribution? It’s just stupidity or worse on the part of Norton’s campaign. She should be asked about it.

        You certainly have the right to think it’s shallow and irrelevant, but I think it’s serious–and so do many other people who care about writing. It’s not a slogan. It’s plagiarism. That’s a no brainer.

        When any politician plagiarizes, and I know they do, they should be asked about it.

        Yes, there’a a lot issues out there. Let’s hear about those too.

        1. Do people attribute

          “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”

          or “Those that would give up liberty for safety deserve neither.”???

          Not so much.  They’ve entered the zeitgeist, as has this one.  It’s even at the top of the Palin 4 Pres blog, unnatributed.  We can make that the next “gotcha” of the elite leftist liberal mainstream press.

      3. Jason is soooo out of touch.  Ralphie you have it right.  

        He probably believes that what he is writing is important.  But the more he defends writing about it shows that he has no idea what is really important in upcoming elections or to the future of Colorado.  

        I think he should write about whatever he wants, but Co Pols should stop putting him on the front page of this state’s most important political blog.  

        This is an academic point, not a political point.

        1. and his image consultant.  Can’t write enough posts about Scotty shaving his mustache to look better for the voters.  I don’t know how that differs from Norton using other peoples words to look better to the voters but whatever floats your boat.

    2. How many reporters drive around the country with an effigy of Bush with flaming pants?

      This is almost the dumbest “scandal” I’ve seen on Pols.  Almost.  I’m sure PN will come up with something to top it before the election, so you’re out of the woods, Jason.

    3. …“assuming he (Ford) was the originator of the phrase”…

      Was Gerry Ford the originator? Was one of his speechwriters? Was it a long-dead politician whose words were dredged up by somebody’s research?

      How about if the phrase has become part of the political lexicon?

      Republicans have their stock phrases and Democrats have theirs.

      I’m with Ralphie on this one. It’s bullshit.

  13. The goal isn’t just to hold candidates responsible for any and every marginal misstep that they may or may not have made, but also to recognize that to the information-saturated, cynically-bored polity less (quantity, not quality) is often more.

    It’s clearly debatable whether this is a legitimate issue, since people who overwhelmingly oppose Norton politically are overwhelmingly chiming in to say that it is a non-issue. The mere fact that it’s at least debatably irrelevant should suggest the possibility, even to someone who disagrees, that it isn’t important enough to pursue at the cost of diluting and losing more substantial issues in the flood of over-zealous scrutiny.

    Should a reporter have done an expose on JFK for pinching his prep school motto? Would having done so have served the public interest? No. Nor does it now.

    In fact, what is “within bounds” is defined by convention and context as well as by law. Going two MPH over the speed limit on the interstate is illegal, but normatively acceptable (even, one might argue, normatively expected). In political speech, the rules for plagarism are, by convention, apparently somewhat relaxed. I won’t take anyone else’s line without attribution, because it would make me uncomfortable to do so, but I’m not going to make a big deal out of an unattributed use of an often-used line whose origins are unclear. It doesn’t make sense to do so.

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