The first time Joe Biden ran for President, back when he could still think more or less clearly, his campaign was derailed by the revelation that his stump speech was substantially plagiarized. Now the Intercept has determined that
“Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign plagiarized portions of its plans for maternal health, LGBTQ equality, the economy, tax policy, infrastructure, and mental health from research publications, media outlets, and a number of nonprofit, educational, and policy groups. The Intercept found that exact passages from at least eight Bloomberg plans or accompanying fact sheets were direct copies of material from media outlets including CNN, Time, and CBS, a research center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the American Medical Association, Everytown for Gun Safety, Building America’s Future Educational Fund, and other organizations. …The plagiarized sections ranged in length from entire paragraphs to individual sentences and fragments in documents that were between five and 174 pages long.
…On Wednesday afternoon, The Intercept sent a detailed query to the Bloomberg campaign. By Thursday morning, one of the plans was completely taken down, while others were changed. The campaign reposted the plan that had been removed on Thursday evening, after this story was published.
If you can make any sense out of the campaign’s “explanation” at the link, please enlighten me. For all the tap-dancing around it, when you publish text as your own and it originated elsewhere, that’s plagiarism.
Amusingly, The Intercept adds,
Bloomberg’s own media entity, Bloomberg News, takes a hard line against plagiarism in its style guide, “The Bloomberg Way.” “Plagiarism—the unattributed copying of others’ work—is inexcusable,” the style guide, which was updated in 2017, reads. “Plagiarism is theft. Be prepared to lose your job if you plagiarize. Always credit original reporting to those who did the legwork, and never reproduce quotes made to others if we heard them ourselves. Press summaries must cite the publication that did the reporting and explain the attribution used in the original story.”
So this is the candidate who is going to rescue Democrats from the Hobson’s choice between Slow Joe, Comrade Bernie, Fauxahontas and Doogie Howser? The best Bloonberg can do is to make whoever the Democrats have to nominate look good by comparison.
Let’s see how much publicity this story gets from the mainstream media.
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Pointer: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.
Ethics Alarms 
My guess, zip, zero, nada.
None. I doubt CBS or anyone else in the mainstream news media minds Bloomberg’s cribbing of their work because benefits their agenda. Thus, Bloomberg’s critics will be told, “The organizations themselves don’t mind, so it’s no big deal” (The Hillary Inoculation).
Bloomberg’s plagiarism is yet one more example of how some supposed smart people can act very stupidly, and, just maybe, get away with it.
That type of plagiarism is easily found out. To think it would not be is either signature stupidity or signature arrogance (believing that even if it is found out, it won’t matter).
But, his supporters, and even some fence-sitters, will brush it off. As a non-story, which it appears to be so far, it is just the Bloomberg campaign using Bloomberg material previously published. If it gathers too much attention, unlikely for someone not named Trump, a staffer will be let go with regret that mistakes were made.
Oh, even the Instapundit commenters were brushing it off as pure”everybody does it.”
I would imagine this kind of egregious action comes from a place of arrogance and hubris. perhaps even a sense of protection, because who would think that the Left leaning media would do due diligence on it’s own. The problem of course is that the media is not monolithic in their preferences and they like different Dem candidates. I bet there was also a sense of entitlement, because Everytown for Gun Safety is Bloomberg’s gun control group, so he can’t plagiarize himself, he would think.
Since I live in Massachusetts, and we have open primaries, I am going to vote in the Dem primaries. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m thinking maybe Bloomberg. As far as Dems are concerned, they could do worse. Second choice: Tulsi. Before I though Bernie, because he’s so wacky it would be funny. But in a “be careful what you wish for” scenario, a Bernie presidency could be a dark thing. Disclosure: I am not a Democrat.
To be fair, he does OWN Everytown. No press outlet will criticize him because he owns a large percentage of the media jobs (roughly 20,000 total). Especially with media layoffs everywhere, no one wants to anger a potential future employer.
Doogie Howser! I prefer Alfred E. Newman or Fred Savage in “The Wonder Years” (which is a great name for his campaign or, as Victor Davis Hanson refers to “Vox,” the young adult section), but Doogie Howser will work all day long. Hah!
Reminds me a Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School,” which wasn’t “Caddyshack” by any means, but it had it’s moments, such as Rodney hiring some guys from NASA to write his physics paper.
Imagine stealing ideas from CNN.
Several commenters have suggested that owning the organization that creates some type of content is the equivalent of creating the original content. I believe we are confusing plagerism with copyright.
As a teacher, a student buying the rights of a particular paper may give that student economic rights but if that student claims it as his or her own original work that still is plagerism. That is my take.
The campaign, and Bloomberg personally, doesn’t have any property rights in what is written for his publications, and publishing it with out attribution is unethical and illegal,
Jack, I agree. I was responding to those suggesting that because Bloomberg owns one organization on gun regulations so it is not really plagerism.
I allowed for the idea that Bloomberg could own rights but claiming he created the original ideas would still be plagerism. I was not saying he actually owned any rights to said ideas.
Bloomberg doesn’t just own Everytown, he IS Everytown. If I was the sole owner, the driving force, and the head of Greenpeace, then ran for President and had Greenpeace policies in my policy statements, I’m not sure I would regard that as plagiarism. If I paid for those policies to be created, it would seem odd not to use them in my policy statements (although I would make sure the paperwork to allow its use would be in order). I understand that Everytown is a separate organization on paper, but I just don’t view that the same was I would view him putting big chunks of Ezekiel Emmanuel’s ‘Full Life’ plan as his healthcare strategy. I would view it similar to Trump University using HR and employee training documents from Trump’s resorts.
“…were direct copies of material from media outlets including CNN, Time, and CBS, a research center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the American Medical Association, Everytown for Gun Safety, Building America’s Future Educational Fund, and other organizations.”
We can quibble about the organizations that MB “owns”, but that doesn’t excuse the rest.