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.