Jan. 13--We don't mean to suggest that there's a smart way for one political candidate to steal the ideas of another. But there's definitely a dumb way.
Brandon Loggins, who's running for alderman of Chicago's 18th Ward, completed our candidate survey in part by lifting entire paragraphs from the survey that Chuks Onyezia submitted in 2011. Cut and paste.
One example:
Onyezia, 2011: "I have lived in the 18th Ward for many years, and in speaking with my fellow residents, the consensus is nobody is willing to suffer from a further reduction of the services that many of these residents depend on."
Loggins, 2015: "I have lived in the 18th Ward for many years, and in speaking with my fellow residents, the consensus is nobody is willing to suffer from a further reduction of the services that many of these residents depend on."
Four years is a long time. Maybe Loggins -- or whoever filled out the survey for him -- assumed nobody would notice.
But guess who else is on the ballot in the 18th?
Yep: Onyezia.
The survey Loggins submitted to the Sun-Times also included passages borrowed nearly word for word. Onyezia spotted them right away and called to complain.
We tried to contact Loggins for an explanation, but he didn't call us back. He told the Sun-Times it was a "communications error."
The Sun-Times took Loggins' survey down. We're leaving it up at chicagotribune.com/loggins so you can compare it yourself to Onyezia's 2011 survey, which is here: chicagotribune.com/onyezia.
This isn't the first time we've received a survey that was plagiarized. They're pretty easy to spot, if you want to know the truth. Ask any high school student who got busted trying to cut and paste a term paper from the Internet.
Teachers can get pretty testy about students representing someone else's work as their own. So can we. Our candidate surveys are a valuable resource for voters and an important part of our endorsement process. We endorsed Onyezia in 2011, in fact, in part because we liked many of his answers. We're not liking Loggins' cut-and-paste version, though.
Mr. Loggins, a piece of advice: If you want to recycle ideas, make sure they're your own.
