---When I’m looking for a

---When I’m looking for a concise, literal definition of some concept, I usually turn to Black’s Law Dictionary
because it’s written by lawyers and legal scholars, not writers.
Lawyers make their living from highlighting esoteric language
conundrums to protect their clients; writers (and I should know) have a
tendency to exploit those same language difficulties. Lawyers may not
be good for a lot of things, but one thing they are good at is keeping
certain definitions in the English language clear and concise. I
don’t believe, as you see below, that we can say the same of most
writers, particularly the subject of today’s excoriation: Steve Berg
of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Today’s definition from Black’s is Plagiarism
The act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts
or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and
passing them off as the product of one’s own mind. If material is
protected by copyright, such act may constitute an offense of copyright
infringement.
To be liable for plagiarism it is not necessary to exactly duplicate
another’s literary work, it being sufficient unfair use of such a
work is made by lifting of substantial portion thereof, but even an
exact counterpart of another’s work does not constitute plagiarism if
such courterpart was arrived at independently. O’Rourke v. RKO Radio
Pictures, D.C.Mass, 44F.Supp. 480, 482, 483.

Now, to be fair my edition of Black’s
is quite old---about ten years or so, so the legal definition might
have changed with precedents that have unfolded over that period of
time, but I can’t imagine that it would have changed in a substantial
enough fashion to let a plagiarist off the hook. Undoubtedly, you’re
asking now, what the hell is she rambling on about this time? Fair question, I admit, but I was shell-shocked to read Steve Berg’s editorial in the Star Tribune, titled Growing Divide, here and afar and I just can’t keep quiet about it: the man is guilty of plagiarism. Using the Black’s definition of plagiarism as our guide, Berg …appropriate{ed}
the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his
writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and pass{ed} them off
as the product of one’s own mind.

The source material that was so blatantly plagiarized was a series of articles on America published in The Economist’s
November 8, 2003, edition. On a regular basis this magazine publishes
surveys of geographical regions, countries, business topics, and, in a
recent edition, a world religion---Islam. The purpose of these surveys
is to occasionally go back and review what is actually going on in
these areas: they highlight how things are the same since the last time
this subject was surveyed, and more importantly, they also show how
things are different. Now, The Economist publishes these quite
regularly---I would say once a month or so, and they’re fascinating
to read. I enjoyed reading the survey of America: it was enlightening,
to say the least. The survey’s stated purpose was to try and explain
why America is different than Europe or, for that matter, any other
country on Earth. It asked important questions: why is American
politics so polarized; what part does religion play in our politics;
why is our patriotism different; what sets us apart from Europe, etc.
It was twenty pages of well-researched, non-politicized, empirical
explanations of America’s people and our government’s behavior and
Mr. Berg, apparently, found it to be as thought provoking as I did. I
was going to write about it, as well, but Mr. Berg beat me to the
punch, and in such a blatant way.
It’s compare and contrast time, boys and girls. Are we ready? {insert
collective nod of heads here} Ok, and we’re off.
Berg: As recently as two years ago the United States cast a long
shadow of sympathy and unity. The civilized world was horrified at the
vicious terror attacks on New York and Washington. "Nous sommes tous
Améri-cains," proclaimed the French newspaper Le Monde. We are all
Americans.
The elder George Bush predicted that these attacks would "erase the
concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it alone." The
historian Francis Fukuyama, in line with his "End of History" writings,
said that 9/11 had made America a more ordinary country in terms of its
interests and vulnerabilities "rather than thinking of itself
unilaterally able to define the nature of the world it lives in."

Ok, so if you were reading this and you hadn’t read The Economist this past week, you’d think hey, they guy’s well read, or he at least knows how to research.
Not everyone knows who Francis Fukuyama is: he’s pretty obscure---big
in certain academic circles, but his work is not really something
you’d pick up at Barnes and Noble to while away the time. I knew who
he was, however, and the only reason I knew was because I’d
read a few articles of his during my political science days back at
Iowa State. But I’d remembered him being quoted recently---in the Economist---and
this is the passage that set my alarm bells off. So, I went and snagged
my copy and started looking for the passage that quotes him, and…
Economist: At first, America and the world seemed to change
together. “We are all New Yorkers now,” ran an e-mail from Berlin
that day, mirroring John F. Kennedy's declaration 40 years earlier,
“Ich bin ein Berliner”, and predicting Le Monde's headline the next
day, “Nous sommes tous Américains”. And America, for its part,
seemed to become more like other countries. Al-Qaeda's strikes, the
first on the country's mainland by a foreign enemy, stripped away
something unique: its aura of invulnerability, its sense of itself as a
place apart, “the city on a hill”.
Two days after the event, President George Bush senior predicted that,
like Pearl Harbour, “so, too, should this most recent surprise attack
erase the concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it
alone.” Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins
University, suggested that “America may become a more ordinary
country in the sense of having concrete interests and real
vulnerabilities, rather than thinking itself unilaterally able to
define the nature of the world it lives in.”
Shaking my head, I read on. Berg then decided to throw in some of his
own commentary, you know, to break up the plagiarism (sorry, kids, but
it’s a distinct pattern).
This turn toward humility and unity with other Western democracies
never happened.
President George W. Bush, with the apparent assent of most Americans,
led the nation in quite the opposite direction. Perhaps never has
America stood so alone and alienated from the community of nations as
now. Seldom has domestic politics been so irreconcilably divided.

Then we get back to copying someone else’s work. Berg jumped articles. The passage above is taken from “A Nation Apart;” In this next section, he plagiarizes from a different article: “Politics As Warfare.”

Berg: The
man who campaigned as a unifier has accomplished the opposite. Two
years ago, more than 80 percent of Republicans and Democrats gave Bush
their approval. Today, the president enjoys nearly as much support
among Republicans, but the approval of Democrats has nose-dived to
below 20 percent. This is a gap of historic proportions leading toward
next year's elections.

Economist: As for Mr Bush himself, he
has proved a polarising president, better at solidifying the Republican
base than at extending it. Two years after September 2001, his own
party's approval of him stood at over 80%, but Democratic approval had
fallen below 20%. This stunning gap marks Mr Bush as even more divisive
than Bill Clinton, who suffered just as much from Republicans'
hostility as Mr Bush does from Democrats'. But whereas Mr Clinton's
policies were more popular than he was, with Mr Bush it is the other
way around. His ratings on the economy and tax cuts are lower than his
overall approval levels.
Wait, it gets even better.

Berg: Apparently
we are, as the social historian Gertrude Himmelfarb described us, "one
nation, two cultures" -- one more religious, traditional and patriotic,
the other more secular, tolerant and multicultural.

Economist: In
1999, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a social historian, argued that America is
becoming “One Nation, Two Cultures”. One is religious, puritanical,
family-centred and somewhat conformist. The other is tolerant,
hedonistic, secular, predominantly single and celebrates
multiculturalism. These value judgments are the best predictor of
political affiliation, far better than wealth or income.

Then Berg goes on to extrapolate from this description, by using one paragraph to state his case, whereas The Economist
used the rest of their article---all seventeen paragraphs of it---to
back their case up with actual (gasp!) empirical evidence. Berg: Bush's pugnacious attachment to the first culture, his
eagerness to export the superiority of American values, has severely
damaged America's standing in the world, as the president may discover
on his trip to Britain this week. And it has profoundly divided the
home front.

You can find the article here.
Berg then goes into actual anecdotal evidence that he’s garnered, rather than stolen.

Berg: It's
not hard to find this divide in daily life.
In my church parking lot last Sunday, two friends paused to engage in
what has become a common lament: what to do about a president they find
deeply offensive, repulsive and embarrassing. "When he comes on TV, I
can't bear to watch," said Sandra, a college professor. She can't abide
Bush's overly simplistic view of the world, she said, his paper-thin
patriotism, his glib tossing out of phrases like "America believes in
freedom" and "America will fight evil," his aura of simultaneous
arrogance and ignorance.
Mostly she hates the notion that she, as a critic, is not patriotic,
not "normal" in the sense of what a good American should be. She told
of a casual political discussion on a recent hiking trip during which
she was scolded for being "a Democrat -- which also means you're an
atheist."
Then on Wednesday I had a lengthy phone conversation with my friend
Bob, who is a radio station broker in St. Petersburg, Fla. He told me
what he so admires in Bush: moral clarity.
The president may not be well-spoken, but his unashamed embrace of
American values is profoundly important, Bob said, because it's clearer
now than before 9/11 that the world is divided into good and evil.
Being an American, he said, carries with it belief in fundamental,
universal ideas: that individual liberty is better than collective
effort, that free societies are not just different from oppressed
societies, but are better.
"I know how this must sound to much of the world and to some people
here, but I don't mind being an arrogant American because I stand for
something," Bob told me, adding that he's sick of the notion that
Americans must continue to examine themselves when it's others who are
at fault. There's no shame in Bush's attempt to secure basic freedoms
for the people of the Middle East, he said, because it's for mutual
benefit.
I’m not going to congratulate him for actually doing his job, but it
should be said that he knows how to do so, even if he does get lazy on
occasion.
The next section is obviously where all those nagging little doubts
about being a plagiarizer came into Berg’s mind, because he decides
to cover his ass. Berg: These are the tenets of "American exceptionalism," a phrase
popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-19th century to
describe the American character. As discussed exhaustively in the Nov.
8-14 issue of the Economist, the expression carries both the notion of
America as peculiar and the presumption by Americans that the rest of
the world would benefit by copying us.

Oh, so that’s where all this stuff came from, eh, Steve? But, you say, he credited his source. I’ll get to that in a little while, but no, really, he didn’t.
It’s important to note that The Economist
did not come to the same conclusion about de Tocqeville’s description
of “American Exceptionalism.” That’s Berg’s conclusion of de
Tocqueville: not theirs. The Economist went on where Berg stopped and the following is just a sample of the rest of the article.

Economist:
In his book {de Tocqueville} “Democracy in America”, he described
not only what is particular to democracy, especially the way in which
it changes how people think and act (what he calls “the quiet action
of society upon itself”). He also described what was, and is,
particular to America: its size, the institutions it had inherited from
England, its decentralised administration. These two versions of
American exceptionalism have more in common than might appear at first
sight. Both suggest that the experience of America is open to others.
The idea of America-as-model implies that other countries can come to
be more like America, though American differences may still persist
over time. The idea that America is intrinsically different is also
consistent with the notion that outsiders can become American, but they
must go there to do it and become citizens—hence America's
extraordinary capacity to assimilate immigrants.
There are three points to grasp from this gallop through the history of
American exceptionalism. First, it is, as Mr. Lipset put it, a
double-edged sword. It helps explain the best and the worst about the
country: its business innovation and its economic inequality; its
populist democracy and its low voter turn-out; its high spending on
education and its deplorable rates of infant mortality and teenage
pregnancy. Exceptionalism is often used either as a boast or as a
condemnation—though in reality it is neither.
Second, the two strands help explain why exceptionalism is divisive
within America itself. Most Americans are doubtless proud of the
“exemplary” qualities of their country. But the non-exemplary, more
peculiar features do not always command universal approval.
Third, there should be nothing surprising, or necessarily disturbing,
in a revival of exceptionalism. America has almost always been seen as
different. The question is: has anything changed recently?
Ok, I can accept Berg’s truncated conclusion of de Tocqueville, but
in truncating it in the first place, he excluded all of the significant
parts of de Tocqueville: mainly, to quote the man himself, (and this is
from The Economist as well, so don’t shoot me down for not citing properly)
“Everything about the Americans,” said Alexis de Tocqueville, “is
extraordinary, but what is more extraordinary still is the soil that
supports them.” The main point being that America is America
because the land we live on allows our democracy to flourish because
there’s so darned much of it. The rest of the article goes on to
compare and contrast Europe and America to make the point that American
Exceptionalism is unique to our country and unlikely to form
elsewhere---a key point that de Tocqueville heralded and has yet to be
proven as viable. But that’s a niggling little detail to Berg: he’s
afraid it might happen---now---with George W. Bush as the standard
bearer. Berg: Bush's response to 9/11 has greatly magnified American
exceptionalism, the British magazine suggests, causing much of the
world to worry about this nation's military strength, its growing
religiosity, its veer to the right. As democracies grow wealthier, they
tend to be less militaristic, more secular and more introspective, the
magazine notes. But not America.
The Economist, long a keen observer of all things American, concludes
editorially that just because America is different doesn't make it
wrong, that the world has more to gain than to lose from American
exceptionalism. I agree. I'll put our values against anyone's. But no
one trusts a bully, even if he insists he's doing you a favor. Like my
friend Sandra, I wish for a president who's less reckless and a
government with a touch more humility. As Tocqueville wrote in 1840,
"There's nothing more annoying than this irritable patriotism of the
Americans."

I don’t have much to say to that, because The Economist does state as much in its editorial, albeit in much less sinister tones. You can read it here
and judge for yourself. The point would be, however, at least he
credits the editorial, whereas the rest of Berg’s commentary revolves
around appropriating others work and using it as evidence to back up
his points.
Now, Berg did cite his source. I can agree with that statement---in
theory. But it reads like it’s his. And that’s what I have a problem with. If he had simply started off the article with, in
last week’s issue of The Economist the research division published a
twenty page, mulitple article, survey of America, focusing on the
theory of American Exceptionalism and how it leads to profound
differences in understanding what America is all about and how it will
affect other nations… But he didn’t: he didn’t think it was
necessary. Berg led the reader to believe he was the one who unearthed
Francis Fukuyama’s studies. It’s the same situation with Gertrude
Himmelfarb. He didn’t even bother to quote the source of his
statistics---which The Economist cited as a Gallup poll---that Democratic approval of President Bush had fallen to 20%. In other words, to use Black’s, definition of plagiarism, Berg
appropriate{ed} the literary composition of another, or parts or
passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and
pass{ed} them off as the product of one’s own mind. The
plagiarism is particularly egregious if you were reading the Star
Tribune’s print edition: most of the article ran on the front page of
the OpEx section, but the section where he cites his source was on page AA3.

Now, he did cover his ass technically speaking---but how many of us have written research papers? Would an act of appropriation such as this gotten you
thrown out of school? I know I would have been booted if I had tried
something so egregious on a term paper. What makes it different for
Berg? The fact he’s has the obvious column length restrictions? The
fact he’s got only so many column inches means he’s allowed a pass
on intellectual dishonesty because there wasn’t room for it?
Baloney. For me, Berg’s plagiarism is on par with a kid who’s got a
report to write and little time to achieve the task. What does that kid
generally do? They pull the encyclopedia off the shelf or they hit the
internet, looking for research. Invariably, the child will be tempted
and will start copying straight from the source, changing words here or
there to make it sound like it’s their own work. What makes Berg any
better than some kid who pulls as stunt like this? Go back up and read
Berg’s explanation of Himmelfarb’s thesis and then read The Economist’s and I think you’ll get my point.

It’s intellectual dishonesty of the worst sort: the author cites the source but obviously assumes you’re
too lazy to go and look up the citation; that you’ll just take his
word that this is the actual conclusion the source came to and that the
author is citing them correctly. And it’s very easy for Berg
to get away with it, too. After all, if you’re a regular reader of
this site, you know you can’t get any of these articles off The Economist’s
website without paying for a subscription. And what makes it worse is
that Berg’s trying to sway your---the reader’s—opinion with his
clever research and quotations. But it’s not his
research. Does that help or hinder his credibility? It definitely
hinders it for me. I don’t know about you, but I’m not likely to
take this guy at his word from now on because I know he lied to me. He
was dishonest with his work. And if Berg really wanted to make
a point with this commentary, perhaps he shouldn’t have stolen others
ideas and work in such a blatant fashion. (Oh, and he also gave the
wrong link to the Economist in his citation)

Posted by Kathy at November 1, 2003 07:11 PM | TrackBack