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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was caught picking up a TPM passage without proper attribution.
From the Politico
A TPMCafe blogger charged plagiarism earlier after picking up on a striking similarity between a passage in Maureen Dowd’s column today and a recent post by TPM editor Josh Marshall.
Dowd: “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.”
Marshall: “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.”
Since then, Dowd’s column has been updated with a reference to Marshall and notes that there hadn’t been proper attribution in the original Times piece.
While it might be assumed that Dowd accidentally cut-and-pasted the passage in her notes, and forgot the attribution, she tells Huffington Post that she never actually read Marshall’s item. So how did it wind up on today’s op-ed page?
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.
So Dowd unknowingly quoted Marshall without attribution, while assuming she was knowingly quoting a friend without attribution — a friend who apparently has a great memory for remembering TPM posts verbatim and feeding them to Times columnists.
It’s hard to believe that in this day and age that Dowd would try to get away with any type of plagiarism with all the scrutiny by bloggers and others, but her explanation is thin to say the least.
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About the author
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.
4 Comments for Dowd’s Innocent Plagiarism
This is typical of the progressive left…blame someone else. But really, this one really reeks.
Anyway, she’ll probably win a Pulitzer for this one.
Then here is Lee-Anne carrying water for her, trying to justify Dowds plagiarism by blaming the original writer, PM editor Josh Marshal for doing the same.
Let us not let Dowd off the hook. She is quite able to defend herself, if there is a defense to stealing someone else’s work!
My Gawd, you should have heard the hot air bloviated by the Right Wing blowhards on most of America’s radio airwaves on this one. The radio station owners have freedom of speech (while our ideas and opinions do not) on the radio, so they went full blast, braying about Dowd’s slip, hardly plagiarism, by failing to attribute 43 words of her column to some other writer.
Dowd is on target 99.99 percent of the time, so they seek any chink in her armor. This is merely a distraction, not unlike the Right Wing windbags trying to discredit Nancy Pelosi while attempting to call attention away from the law-breaking by Bush and Cheney in their venture into violating our Constitution and using torture.
Not to worry. It seems most Americans are getting wise to this stuff, despite the fact that American right-wing radio would make Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, green with envy.
PM editor Josh Marshal himself was parroting the ideas of other writers who’d been writing about this subject for weeks previous to his blog, not one of which is attributed, but simply lifted from the popular press and other bloggers. He may have supplied original words, and badly-written awkward words at that, but ideas deserve credit every bit as much as mere words.
Most columnists regurgitate the ideas of others, and indeed this post above is only a “me too” without much, if any, unique contribution to the debate.