The Republican presidential candidate’s column ran from 2000 and 2006 and appears to have cut-and-pasted language from sources ranging from the Washington Post to an Arkansas Supreme Court justice’s opinion to a quote from Bill Clinton.
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Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appears to have committed plagiarism while governor of Arkansas, cut-and-pasting from an array of sources when writing a weekly column that ran on his official state website.
Huckabee wrote columns between 2000 and 2006 that contain language identical to or closely resembling that in articles by news organizations such as the Associated Press and the Washington Post, the testimony of a state police officer before a House subcommittee, an Arkansas Supreme Court Justice's opinion, a Yale University brochure, and a Clinton Foundation press release, including a quote from Bill Clinton, among other sources.
A Huckabee spokesperson said BuzzFeed News' allegations were not "evidence of plagiarism," but rather "an election year political witch hunt."
Although the columns were written in the first person and sometimes opened with the line, "Hello, this is Gov. Mike Huckabee with this week's comment from my corner of the Capitol," the spokesperson distanced the governor directly from the columns, saying they "were written by communications staff."
The plagiarism in Huckabee's columns, which BuzzFeed News accessed through an archiving service, followed certain patterns. Huckabee often made passing mention of a source, then failed to acknowledge how much of or where the column's diction and structure was taken from.
A column published on April 1, 2000 notes that Colonel Thomas Mars of the Arkansas State Police had recently testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime and suggests that they had a discussion. It does not, however, disclose that much of the preceding narrative, which describes the death of a state trooper and a deputy county sheriff, as well as the dynamics of the meth industry in Arkansas, is taken from Mars' testimony.
He plagiarized the Washington Post in a similar fashion. Huckabee observed that the re-surfacing of ivory-billed woodpecker, previously thought to be extinct, had made the front page of the Post. But later in the May 2005 column, Huckabee does not quote or cite the paper, though some of his lines are verbatim duplicates of lines in the Post's story. "It was about 1 p.m. and overcast," and "It landed on a tree trunk about 60 feet away. Sparling's camera was in a rubber bag on his lap," are sentences that appear in both.
By the same token, in a March 2006 column, Huckabee attributed some statistics to "the Supreme Court" without acknowledging that much of the language in the previous and subsequent paragraphs was the same as that in a March 2000 opinion by Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Brown.
"Local funds were collected from the local tax base tied to property values within the districts," Huckabee wrote, changing Brown's "tied to" to "collected from." "School districts with higher property values obviously generated higher local taxes and more money available for education." Where Huckabee wrote 'obviously,' Brown had written 'necessarily.'
On other occasions, Huckabee cited the findings of studies or reports, sometimes explicitly suggesting that he had read them in their original versions, while in fact recycling text from summaries of those studies.
A column Huckabee wrote in August 2003, opens by claiming, "I've recently been reading a number of studies that show that the biggest factor in determining whether young people earn a bachelor's degree from college is a strong academic curriculum in high school." He then summarizes those studies in language that strongly resembled summaries previously published in a report by the Education Commission of the States.
That report's summary of one 1999 study is almost identical to Huckabee's opening sentence. "According to this study the biggest factor in determining whether young people earn a bachelor's degree is participation in a strong academic curriculum in high school," it says.
Sometimes Huckabee seems to have reorganized phrases in which the words themselves are the same or slightly changed the wording while maintaining the same structure. An October 2004 column evinces such tactics, apparently mimicking a Yale brochure advertising the achievements of the Schools of the 21st Century program in Arkansas.
At other times, Huckabee appears to have deployed the straightforward plagiarism technique of simply presenting another person's phrasing as his own with no reference to the source. Examples of this can be found in a column in July 2002, which includes a sentence identical to one in an Associated Press story from just over two week earlier and a June 2004 column that re-states the wording of the employee of a trucking company quoted the month before in the Christian Science Monitor.
Two July 2000 columns also appear to copy lines and quotes from an April 2000 Business Wire report. On July 1, Huckabee appropriated the claim of the CEO of the Delta Enterprise Corporation, quoted in Business Wire, that, "If the gap between the Delta and other regions is going to close, we must complement manufacturing recruiting with investments in technology, health services and other promising sectors of our economy. There's not a single solution or a simple one."
Finally, Huckabee wrote a May 2006 column with language first seen in a press release by the Clinton Foundation.
The column and press release described an initiative in which Huckabee was involved in his capacity as a leader of an organization called the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. It is unclear if his staff issued a press releases to match the Clinton Foundation's, but regardless, there is one glaring overlap between Huckabee's column and the press release.
In one paragraph, Huckabee cites a quote by former President Bill Clinton, who called what the governor describes as "new guidelines to combat childhood obesity" and "a bold step forward in the struggle to help America's kids live healthier lives."
Huckabee then takes credit for the ensuing words of praise for leaders of the beverage companies that helped craft the guidelines.
"I commend them for taking this important step," he wrote on May 10, 2006. "There is a lot of work to be done to turn this problem around but this is a big step in the right direction and it will help improve the diet of millions of students across the country."
Compare this to Clinton's quote in the press release, published on May 3: "I commend them for being here today and for taking this important step. There is a lot of work to be done to turn this problem around but this is a big step in the right direction and it will help improve the diet of millions of students across the country."
"If you look at the data and care to check the facts, you will find no evidence of plagiarism, but you will find evidence of an election year political witch hunt. During Governor Huckabee's tenure in Arkansas, the weekly columns and weekly radio addresses were written by communications staff and the sources were numerous. They frequently cited agencies and cabinet members who were more than happy to provide the information; often times the content originated from conversations with the governor himself. The communications office was often encouraged to use data and information that was provided through Gov. Huckabee's service as Chairman of the Council of State Governments and Chairman of the Education Commission of the States."
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