It's not just Biden: many Democrats raise material from other sites

Twenty-four hours after the start of Joe Biden's campaign to raise unseen excerpts from a climate change plan, it is clear that the former vice president has a lot of company.

A sample of policy proposals from Biden's main rivals suggests that the removal of direct text in academic journals, think tanks, or policy institutes – and the correction of facts without charge – is quite common on 2020 campaigns.

History continues below

A POLITICO magazine has found documents already published on the official websites of the Sens campaign. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, as well as frequent use of facts and data without mentioning many others.

"Today, more than a million women in America have been shot by an intimate partner," Harris wrote in the "Gender Equality" section of his website.

Each city, the gun security group, has a remarkably similar line on its own site, with a minor scale difference: "Nearly one million women alive today have been affected by a intimate partner ".

The Harris website also notes that "black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women."

This language is identical to the phrasing found on the website of the American Heart Association – less attribution: "According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy than white women."

These usual practices are not very different from those that provoked Biden on Tuesday, when the first reports were revealed, identifying a number of dubious passages in Biden. $ 1.7 trillion climate plan.

In one case, the text of the Biden Plan contained the same language technology for capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, as previously published by the non-governmental organization Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, as well as the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups and workers.

"Several quotes, sometimes from sources cited in other parts of the plan, were inadvertently left in the final version of the 22-page document," acknowledged the Biden campaign. "As soon as we learned about it, we updated it to include the appropriate quotes."

The question is particularly sensitive for Biden, as she recalled a plagiarism scandal that derailed her 1988 presidential campaign. Then it was revealed that Biden had recited the lines of a speech from the leader of the British Labor Party Neil Kinnock, adopting part of the story as his.

But for other campaigns, the question is not as resonant – and this is reflected in lax attribution standards.

in the voting rights section on the website of the former Republic. Beto O'Rourke, this language echoes President Barack Obama. "Americans should not have to break their hands to exercise their fundamental right to vote," reads the text.

Obama used a similar metaphor in 2014 when he stated that "no citizen, including our service member, should be forced to jump overboard to exercise his most basic right."

In a medium to post In March, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker lamented that "the reality is that there are currently more Afro-Americans under criminal supervision than they were enslaved in 1850" – an idea expressed in Title Vox when singer John Legend mentioned it in a 2015 Oscar speech.

The actual source of the factoid appears to be Michelle Alexander, the author of the 2010 book "The New Jim Crow" and the subject of an article entitled "More black men are in prison today than they were in slavery in 1850. "

Echoing Biden's campaign, the campaigns contacted for this story insisted that these were not examples of plagiarism or improper levies as well as quotes of data relatively well known to activists.

"These are statistics," Harris spokesman Ian Sams said.

In fact, Everytown expressed a note of gratitude for the use of Harris's statistics on his weapon, even though the group was not cited.

"Every city spends resources on gun safety so all Americans can use them," spokeswoman Stacey Radnor said. "We are excited to see candidates base their gun safety platforms on research and facts to draw attention to the crisis of gun violence in our country that kills 100 Americans. and wounds hundreds of others every day.

In the case of O'Rourke's use of a language similar to that of President Obama, spokesman Chris Evans said the phrase "jumping through hoops" is a common idiom.

"Even if we admire President Obama, we did not extract from his archives an arbitrary 2014 declaration when we created our historic voting rights plan nearly five years later," Evans said. "Voting is a fundamental right because it is enshrined in the Constitution and has been championed by Americans across the country in the centuries that followed."

Deborah R. Gerhardt, Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina and an expert on copyright and plagiarism, stated that she saw no transgression on the part of the candidates in any of the examples above. She stated that the context mattered and that it was clear that the candidates, including Biden, were relying on the facts of others and did not claim that a unique expression of the work of someone from one day to the next. Another belonged to them.

"I do not consider this plagiarism. I do not see them saying, "These are my data," said Gerhardt.

"When a political candidate repeats statistics from another source, I do not think people think that politicians have done their own data analysis.

"They are politicians and people expect them to be based on a study or other facts. Do not we want our politicians to listen to people who are doing research or collecting data and talking to the public? "

That's what Sanders seems to have done in at least one situation.

"A fundamental shift in US agricultural and rural policies is no longer just an option; It's an absolute necessity, "says Sanders on his website, in a statement titled" Revitalizing Rural America "that he launched earlier this year.

This language is almost identical to a line that appears in an obscure academic article on organic farming, first introduced in 2014 and archived on the web in 2018.

"Fundamental changes are no longer just an option; it's an absolute necessity, "wrote John Ikerd, emeritus professor of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri.

A similar formulation, however, has one reason: according to the campaign, Ikerd would have drafted the first version of Sanders' policy.