Ghostwriter Town

In a discussion with a pair of reporters, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews raises an important question about the ubiquitous practice of politicians taking credit for work that they didn’t write themselves:

Does it bother the press that somebody comes in whose book was written for them . . . don’t you essentially disrespect someone who walks in and puts a book on the table and says they wrote it when you know somebody else did, who comes in there and gives a speech when you know that someone else wrote all the jokes for them . . . doesn’t that bother you guys? . . . Why do you let them take credit for books and speeches they didn’t write?

Such criticism seems a bit disingenuous considering that Matthews admits in the same segment that he wrote books and speeches for other politicians. But despite his own hypocrisy and selective targeting, Matthews raises a good question: Why do we let people who “claim to be intellectual leaders” take credit for words and idea that they didn’t produce themselves?

Last year David McGrath wrote an excellent editorial for the Washington Post in which he questions the tolerance for ghostwriting by politicians:

Consider how we react to college students who buy term papers, to author Alex Haley plagiarizing in “Roots” or to Sen. Joe Biden cribbing a few lines from a British politician in 1987. All are judged to be acting improperly because they used others’ words without attribution. Yet those using the words of unacknowledged speechwriters get a free pass.

What’s the difference?

The fact that the writers give permission to the speakers to pretend it’s their own work does not make it okay. That’s exactly what happens with term-paper mills. Just ask Jacksonville State University President William Meehan, who in 2007 was publicly embarrassed and officially denounced after it was discovered that his weekly column in a local paper had routinely been ghostwritten by the college’s publicist.

Nor can second-party speechwriting be justified because it isn’t journalism or scholastic scholarship. Some speechwriters have likened their profession to screenwriting, penning dialogue to be spoken by others. But in the entertainment world, the audience buys seats to witness a fiction. They know the actors don’t write their own material, and authors are acknowledged in screen credits or theater programs.

When was the last time you saw or heard a writer credited at the end of a speech by John McCain or Barack Obama?

My only quibble with McGrath’s point is that speechwriting at the Presidential level is the one area where people are most aware that the words are not the person’s own. It’s the other areas of ghostwriting that need to be exposed.

When I first came to Washington, D.C. I was stunned to find that almost no high-profile figure wrote the op-eds, speeches, and other material that was being credited to them. When I expressed my amazement over this practice people assumed I was “shocked” in a Captain Renault in Casablanca kind of way; in fact, I was shocked in the “I can’t believe they are intentionally deceiving me” kind of way.

If you are using someone else’s words and claiming them as your own then you are deceiving your audience. It’s that simple. But in Washington, excuses are constantly made to rationalize this behavior. For example, the most common refrain is that “everybody already knows it goes on” and that “no one seems to mind.”

First, that simply isn’t true. The elderly lady in Des Moines who reads the op-ed by her local Congressman thinks that he actually wrote the op-ed . And why shouldn’t she? That is usually what is meant we we put someone’s name on the byline. If a newspaper reporter or columnist—whose work appears in print just a few inches over—would be fired for such deception, why is it deemed an acceptable practice?

Second, if “everybody knows” about it then what would be the harm of putting the ghostwriters name on the byline? Why not say that the article was written, for example, by “Rep. I.M. Plagiarizer and Joe Intern”? Call their bluff and you quickly realize that they know full-well that the “everybody knows” excuse is nothing more than a thin cover of self-justification.

What I find most troubling about this phenomena is the willingness of Christians to play the game too. It’s not just Christian politicians but leaders of Christian charities, policy organizations, and think tanks who use the words of others as their own every day. In the early 1980’s, Christianity Today wrote an editorial in which they noted that masking true authorship “is a canny but this-worldly approach to life, a playing of all the angles, a cunning attempt to skirt the edge of moral forthrightness.” I completely agree and think its time for these leaders to stop deceiving their constituents.

We should ask every leader—especially every Christian leader—in D.C. when we see their name on a byline if they wrote the article. Email their staff and ask them to provide an answer. Quite a few of them do write their own material and should be praised for their efforts. But for those who do not—and almost all will answer truthfully—we must also follow-up by letting them know that we expect the person who wrote the material to be given credit in a way that is clear and obvious. Anything less is dishonest—and must not be tolerated.

A small, but not insignificant, step toward changing the culture of deception in Washington can be taken by asking a simply question: Did you write it yourself?