New York, NY – Prominent Columnist Maureen Dowd Caught in Plagiarism Row

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    Maureen DowdNew York, NY – It is an axiom of the new digital media age that high-profile political columnists should generally avoid copying other people’s words without attribution. Nobody wants to have the p-word hung around their necks.

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    It is a further axiom of the age that if a columnist is to borrow a paragraph unattributed, then at least they should ensure it doesn’t belong to Josh Marshall. The man behind Talking Points Memo is one of the sharpest, most deadly bloggers around.

    Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, has cause to ponder both these axioms today after she found herself sucked into a spat over plagiarism. In her column yesterday she launched an attack on Dick Cheney for the former US vice-president’s stance on torture, but in the process merely seems to have inflicted ethical torture upon herself.

    In the article, Dowd wrote: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

    The paragraph is word-for-word identical to a section of a blog by Marshall last week, the only difference being that in place of “the Bush crowd was” he had written “we were”. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t slip by unnoticed.

    Marshall has an enviable track record of investigative reporting.
    Through the New York-based Talking Points Memo, or TPM to its many fans, he broke the story of the Bush administration’s politicised sacking of federal lawyers in 2007; his Muckraker blog is a scourge of corrupt politicians.

    Dowd’s self-defence, posted through rival liberal blog the Huffington Post, is that she didn’t read TPM at all last week. She had been given the idea of the paragraph talking to a friend whom she assumed had been speaking spontaneously.

    “Clearly, my friend must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me.”

    The mistake, corrected by the paper, is paradoxical for Dowd who in 1987 broke a major political plagiarism story. She revealed that then Delaware senator Joe Biden had copied speeches made by Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour party in the UK.

    Her story placed Biden in such bad odour that he pulled out of the 1988 presidential race.

    Two decades later Biden is vice-president – Cheney’s replacement.


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    14 Comments
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    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    14 years ago

    Dowd reflects all of NY TIMES reporting, another reason no one is buying the paper of a ONE TRACK minded company.

    Yosele Pondrek
    Yosele Pondrek
    14 years ago

    Close down that dirty rag NY Times! Send Dowd to the unemployment lines!

    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    14 years ago

    What’s the news here that liberals are liars & crooks?

    Hardy Har Har !
    Hardy Har Har !
    14 years ago

    What a foolish journalist. So she only copied word for word her friend? Now we see that these journalists only take what their small group of political activists and regurgitate it on the pages of the NYT !!! That’s why we don’t read these papers or these journalists online. Let them fail. The free market always is right.

    good american
    good american
    14 years ago

    not the first one from the new york time with the p….. title!!!! she should resign, or they should make her go!!! this is all the NYT, needed now when they so badly are trying to sell their paper.

    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    14 years ago

    She’s a negative person! Her view on Marriage life is horrible, she would always detest living with a man. You would never see a Columnist write with a hate about the republicans like her. She really despise them. But she’s a great writer! And she’s funny too.

    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    14 years ago

    She’s is w writer for many decades one of the greatest one in the country, writing two articles in the Tims is not easy. And you find her now with a couple of words copying from a friend…

    joe
    joe
    14 years ago

    When will the New York Slimes go under already, they make me sick.

    PMO
    PMO
    14 years ago

    If it really is true that her friend repeated the sentence that she had read, and she used it with some level of permission, I guess she gets a pass. I’m not her biggest fan, but if the friend verifies the story, I would believe it. Maureen is not exactly “new” to journalism, and while I frequently disagree with her point of view, she is pretty honest in her reporting.

    PMO
    PMO
    14 years ago

    If it really is true that her friend repeated the sentence that she had read, and she used it with some level of permission, I guess she gets a pass. I’m not her biggest fan, but if the friend verifies the story, I would believe it. Maureen is not exactly “new” to journalism, and while I frequently disagree with her point of view, she is pretty honest in her reporting.

    Conservative One
    Conservative One
    14 years ago

    I thought that liberals are allowed to do such things. Guaranteed that nothing will happen to her because all good liberals will circle her wagon just like they have been defending Princess Pelosi. Have you heard one word from that useless bag of wind Chucky Schumer? i ma sure that if it would have been a Republican you would not have been able to shut him up.