Is Sotto real?
IT’S disconcerting that Sotto thinks if he lifts someone else’s work and translates it into another language, the work becomes his. I’m baffled as to whether Sotto is pretending or truly clueless. Either way, it’s a tragedy.
First, he lifts from not just one but five bloggers yet initially denies using blogs for his speeches. Later, he insists that bloggers do not need to be quoted. In the midst of the furor over accusations of plagiarism, Sotto’s Chief of Staff, Atty. Hector A. Villacorta, takes the flak. Villacorta says the senator did not do it so he should not apologize for it.
While I will not go as far as to think that Sotto condoned the plagiarism, I believe he should have apologized for it. Regardless of who was actually responsible for it, the mistakes were made by his staff. It’s about command responsibility.
Instead, Villacorta gives a half-hearted apology that only serves to incense Sarah Pope, one of the offended bloggers. Adding insult to injury, Sotto’s staff maintains they did no wrong. Aside from alleging that blogs are not copyrighted (Pope’s blog was copyrighted) and thus cannot be plagiarized, they insist that Sotto did not claim the research as his own.
Well, Sotto may not have claimed the research as his own but without proper attribution; it is presumed that the words coming out from your mouth in a speech are the product of your own mind. Sotto’s camp further claims, a blog is meant to be shared so they shared it. No case of plagiarism here.
Let’s not go into semantics. Plagiarism or not, it’s not good practice to pass off other people’s words as your own. I will even limit it to words and not ideas because really, what’s in your head could also be in mine. The least we can do is to use our own words to express ideas which may be shared by many.
Later, Sotto launches into the argument that plagiarism is not a crime. Again, no one is talking about criminal liability here. We’re just talking about plain decency and perhaps something called ethics. No one is claiming to be error-free or sin-free. At one time or another, we have all plagiarized due to ignorance, laziness or both. Whatever the case, we should just apologize, attribute and move on. That’s what Sotto should have done.
I would have thought, though, that after flatly refusing to accept that lifting entire sections of other people’s work is not plagiarism, Sotto would have exercised greater care or common sense over the content of his succeeding speeches. Yet, when he delivers the final portions of his speech before the Senate floor against the Reproductive Health bill, he does it again.
This time, Sotto delivers his speech in Tagalog (in his own words, to be safe) and lifts from one of Robert F. Kennedy’s speeches. When confronted about this, Sotto shockingly asks how the public can accuse him of copying Kennedy when Kennedy doesn’t even speak Tagalog.
Is Sotto for real? If he is, we should seriously rethink the requirements for serving in the Senate.