Joe Biden’s Revenge?
The New York Times‘s Maureen Dowd has admitted to “inadvertently” plagiarizing from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. Maureen Dowd, if you remember, exposed Joe Biden’s plagiarism in 1987.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an email to Huffington Post, admits that a paragraph in her Sunday column was lifted from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall’s blog last Thursday.
Dowd claims that she never read his blog last week but was told the line by a friend of hers. In a follow-up email, she forwarded her desire to apologize to Marshall, writing that had she known, she would have gladly credited Marshall.
Dowd notes that the Times is fixing her column online to give proper credit to Marshall and that a correction will run tomorrow
Excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column:
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.
Note: The paragraph has been changed in Maureen Dowd’s column to give credit to Josh Marshall
Excerpt from Josh Marshall’s Thursday post:
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 we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Dowd’s excuse (from an email to NYTpicker):
josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.
As was said at Daily Kos, her excuse is that she wasn’t plagiarizing Josh Marshall, she was plagiarizing her friend.
Tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times
A lot of irony abounds in this episode. Not only the irony of Dowd exposing someone else’s plagiarism but the worry I had when I was writing this that I would be plagiarizing someone else. There’s only so many way you can write “she wrote this, he wrote that, she responsed saying this.”
Increasingly, I read or listen these pundit-types asking the question: If this person was a blogger, would I add them to my newsreader? Maureeen Dowd — who has occasional flashes of brilliance — would be a no. Would not add her to my news reader.
And if anyone wants to steal that as a QOD, feel free!
And wasn’t Biden’s issue that he didn’t attribute to the author on the 100th time he said it? Mind you, he attributed the reference to the author every other time it previously used during and leading up to his ’88 campaign.
Dowd just ripped it word for word on the first attempt!
But what would you expect from a person with a middle-school-miss-popular-mind-set?
It seems like a much more innocent time, that a unattributed quote could lead to the end of a presidential campaign. Now, we have a Senator who visited a prostitute and wore diapers running for re-election like that never happened.
Dowd lifted the paragraph nearly verbatim. Totally cheap. Her excuse, that she got it from a friend, is even more lame. For a woman who appears to pride herself on the turn of a phrase and an ability to wield an acid pen, this is ridiculously pedestrian.
And now she knows her friends plagiarize too. It would be wonderful if she suddenly got the inspiration for a novel and left the NYT.
I hope she’s feeling a taste of her own medicine. Her excuse is extremely lame. I noticed how she gave a back-handed insult to Josh Marshall – “I didn’t read his column…”