Maureen Dowd is a Plagiarist and a Liar
Maureen Dowd was accused recently of plagiarizing from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, though the NY Times article on the subject never actually uses the word “plagiarized”.
In her original column 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.” Josh Marshall wrote the same sentence on his website, but where Dowd’s column used the phrase “the Bush crowd was,” Marshall used “we were.” For me, the bigger issue here is Dowd’s lying efforts to cover it up. In her email “apology” Dowd wrote the following:
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.
Does anyone actually believe this? Allegedly this unnamed friend read Marhsall’s sentence, repeated it to Dowd some hours later, Dowd then wrote it down some time later as well, and by chance, it read virtually verbatim? Anyone who’s played the game of telephone knows this is a virtual impossibility, especially with a sentence like that.
I suspect Dowd reads Marshall regularly, but the claim she heard the passage from a friend is still plausible. But the chances that her friend repeated it so precisely, and that Dowd remembered it and then wrote it down so accurately, is a farce. Dowd should be ashamed for her pathetic explanation, and the NY Times should be flogged for being a witting accomplice.
A great side story to all of this is that Dowd was instrumental in unearthing Joe Biden’s past plagiarism. Perhaps we should get the Vice-President’s perspective.
3 Responses to “Maureen Dowd is a Plagiarist and a Liar”
She has to say that, because journalists (and I assume that includes people who write on the op ed page) get fired for plagiarizing. She’s probably a goner, but you never know with the Times.
It’s conceivable that by “talking” she meant emailing, and that her “friend” copy-pasted the section without attribution, and that she then copy-pasted her friend (again, without acknowledgement). But that’s really straining it. I doubt Dowd will get the axe from the NYT. They’ll probably call it a “minor oversight.” If she were a conservative, however, she’d have been out the door already.
…If she were a conservative, however, she’d have been out the door already.
That’s just the kind of nonsense that still sends the hand wringers over at the NY Times into a tizzy. 30 years on and those simps still haven’t figured out the game plan. Anyway, we all know the Times is already too sensitive to criticism from people like you (a claim which is considered laughable to actual liberals), so there’s no way the op-ed page editor would hold Dowd and Kristoff to different standards than Brooks or Douthat.