Democratic Senate candidate plagiarized nearly his whole website

(Image credit: Screenshot/Gordon Ball U.S. Senate)

last updated 8 January 2015

A Democratic Senate candidate from Tennessee, Gordon Ball, is the latest target of BuzzFeed's plagiarism exposés. According to BuzzFeed, Ball's campaign website lifted material directly from a number of fellow Democrats' websites, mainly from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown's. Here is one example of the many BuzzFeed provides:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

By putting the big banks and big corporations ahead of small businesses, Washington makes it harder for our small businesses to succeed, thrive and grow.

And here's Ball:

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By putting the big banks and big corporations ahead of small businesses, Washington has made it harder for those small businesses to succeed, thrive and grow.

Ball expressed surprise at the revelation, saying, "I had no idea that this material was cut and pasted on my website from other sources." The plagiarism was blamed on a former campaign intern.

Past BuzzFeed stories have revealed a Democratic gubernatorial candidate who plagiarized biographical information; a GOP Senate candidate who copied her economic plan from multiple other sources; Sen. Rand Paul's use of Wikipedia text in explaining movie plots; and at least eight Republican candidates who plagiarized Paul's issues pages.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.