This week — inbetween putting my 11 year old cat to sleep and dealing with the total destruction of my brick-and-stone mailbox — I’ve been pondering an op-ed piece by David McGrath that was reprinted in my local newspaper.
In a nutshell, Mr. (Dr.?) McGrath states that there shouldn’t be an ethical difference between selling term papers to students to use as their own (illegal) and selling speeches to politicians to use as their own. Hmm.
“Some speechwriters have likened their profession to screenwriting, penning dialogue to be spoken by others. But in the entertainment world, the audience buys seats to witness a fiction. They know the actors don’t write their own material, and authors are acknowledged in screen credits or theater programs. When was the last time you saw or heard a writer credited at the end of a speech by John McCain or Barack Obama?”
What do you think? Click here to read the entire column on the Washington Post website.
