Chadwick Fairbanks III, one of four candidates seeking to lead the Utah Republican Party, deleted a series of posts from his campaign website Thursday that were copied without attribution from outside, conservative-oriented websites.
The posts, lifted in their entirety but with some minor alterations, were taken from the Washington Examiner, NewsWars and the Tenth Amendment Center and published under Fairbanks’ name at utahgopforchadwick.com. Their topics included the potential of Utah becoming a politically competitive or “purple” state, sanctuary cities and the national debt, respectively.
Fairbanks told The Salt Lake Tribune the posts were intended to include links back to their original sources, but his web manager had inappropriately taken liberties with the content.
“I have had a strongly-worded conversation with my guy and we are in the process of rectifying that,” Fairbanks said. “If it goes up, it will have the proper attribution. It will be totally redone.”
The misattributed posts were brought to The Tribune’s attention by an anonymous tipster, who emailed the newsroom objecting to the misattributions.
A spokeswoman for the Utah Republican Party said she was unaware of any formal complaints filed with the organization.
Two posts on Fairbanks’ website — dealing with the recent arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and a plan to improve the Utah Republican Party — appeared to be original works, but also were deleted Thursday.
Fairbanks said he had the practice of providing bullet points and a general topical direction to his staff, who would then create the content for his website. He said posts would be “staunchly” overseen in the future.
“We’re going to probably change how we do that altogether so we don’t run into any issues going forward,” he said.
