UPDATED: NY Times' Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh 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 the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17dowd.html?_r=1
(click image for bigger pic)
TPM's Josh Marshall on Thurs:
"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."All Dowd did was change "we were" to "the Bush crowd was".
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/05/bubbling.php
(click image for bigger pic)
Now, I'm all for cutting & pasting. As a blogger I do it all the time, but I always give credit.
So, if this isn't outright plagiarism by a top NY Times Editorialist, than I'm a happily married, straight man with 4 kids, 2 dogs, a lovely 2nd wife of 15 years with a girl half my age on the side.
Which I assure you all, I am not.
check out my blog some time.....thejoshuablog.com
UPDATE II:
Wonder if the Times plans on paying for the use of words as well? Hmmm
New York Times Considers Two Plans to Charge for Content on the Web
One includes a "meter system," in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. He warned staff at the meeting that this pay model would be "tricky." If the word-count limit or page-view limit is set too low, it could chase readers off, compromising traffic and advertising revenue. He said the site presently makes "a lot, a lot of money" from digital advertising--though he wouldn't specify how much--and that executives at the paper believe it is "substantially more" than The Wall Street Journal currently makes on a subscription-based pay model. On the other hand, he said, set these bars too high and there will be little improvement in revenue.
UPDATE III:
From HuffPo's Marcus Baram:
Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM's Josh Marshall
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.Yeah, she was told "the line" by someone? The line? She should have just said it was an error and that she meant to credit him. This "heard the line" is, well, a line.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.
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.
UPDATE IV:
Some other posts about this story:
From Politico: Dowd lifts TPM passage; updates NYT column & NYT defends Dowd in TPM flapFrom Media Matters: How would the NYT react if Joe Biden gave an excuse this lame?& NYT claims MoDo is "eager" to give credit; Tucker disagrees
From Bink (DailyKos): Maureen Dowd Caught 'Borrowing Text' in NYT? Dowd Responds ...
CSM: A "plagiarized" account of Maureen Dowd's plagiarism
Newsbusters:NYT's Maureen Dowd Caught Plagiarizing Left-wing Blogger
Gawker: Maureen Dowd Admits to an Act of Accidental Plagiarism
HuffPo: Say It Ain't So, modo & What Maureen Dowd is Trying to Tell Us
guardian.co.uk: New York Times columnist caught in plagiarism row
Media Bistro: NY Times Absolves Maureen Dowd
NY Mag: Which E-mail Pal Helped Dowd Plagiarize?
AP: NY Times columnist admits using blogger's words & Correction: Times-Dowd story
The Atlantic: Maureen Dowd's Astonishing Feats of Verbal Memory
Colorado Independent: Maureen Dowd: parasitic blogger
Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher): 'The Guardian' Covers Maureen Dowd Wrongdoing -- and Contributes its Own
The Weekly Standard: MoDo-gate: It's the Cover Up That Kills
The Insider.com: Maureen Dowd ripped off blogger, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall
The Political Carnival: NY Times' Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall
LOL, this is the best post of the day.
Nevermind that the original "fact" is only worth the attention of someone with the colossal inteligence of Maureen Dowd, the comedy of cut and paste is priceless.
The fact that Wilkerson, who is the source of this story, cannot get his timeline straight and is factually wrong makes this comedy of two parrots stealing from another worthy of Jon Stewart.
May 17, 2009 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lalo, sometime you are a silly little boy.
May 17, 2009 5:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
On its good days...
May 17, 2009 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lullo, as usual, the first with the worst...
May 18, 2009 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like being silly.
But, Wilkerson "learned" that Cheney authorized evil interrogation techniques in April and May 2002. And the efforts to uncover Iraq links were furious that they didn't stop until al-Libi "revealed" his contacts with Iraq.
But the small and inconvenient detail is that al-Libi actually professed the links in February of 2002. Ooops!
And when al-Libi changed his story, he also recanted the admission that he was a member of al Qaida.
May 17, 2009 5:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep. You're truly silly.
Al-Libi was tortured in Egypt by Egyptians. His "revelations" about ties between Al Queda and Iraq were already doubted in a report by the DIA in February 2002: al-Libi could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used, or where the alleged training took place. This report was widely circulated in the intelligence community so Cheney desperately needed more proof. Yet despite the DIA's report, al-Liby's claims were still used to bolster the case for war in an October 2002 speech by Bush, and woul also be included in Colin Powell’s UN-speech.
The authorization Wilkerson talked about was torture by Americans, not the torture-by-proxy al-Liby endured.
May 17, 2009 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're just as full of it as Marshall and Dowd.
From Wilkerson: "This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts".
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/
Get your proxy story straight, Steven King.
May 17, 2009 9:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
You apparently have a reading comprehension problem: the torture on al-Liby himself ceased after he revealed contacts between Al Queda and Iraq. That was the point Wilkerson was making.
Once al-Liby had "revealed" this info, the torture stopped. But why on earth DID they stop? We were told torture was needed to stop ticking timebombs from ticking. Al Liby had already revealed info on the shoebomber during normal interrogation by the FBI. Yet, torture was used on him to get info on Iraq-Al Queda links, not ticking timebombs, Watson
May 17, 2009 9:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes that's where Wilkerson is full of shit.
May 17, 2009 9:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
good shit, mind you...
May 18, 2009 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Forgive me if I don't find torture -- for any reason -- justified, or silly.
May 17, 2009 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Except partial birth abortion.
May 17, 2009 10:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, NOW you come out of the shadows. Typical!
May 17, 2009 10:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
And by the way, you do not know my views on partial birth abortion, any more than I know your views on the Rapture.
May 17, 2009 10:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bullshit. You're making that up from thin air.
It was only reported that al-Liby recanted his claim that Iraq had provided training in poisons and gases to members of al-Qaeda
May 17, 2009 9:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I find the ability of liberals to say two contradictory things at once rather ironic.
First we have pages and pages of "evidence" that torture doesn't work and produces false confessions.
Then we have Wilkerson claim the non-stop torture by Cheney to produce Iraq/al-Qaida links, for several months, no less.
And Colin Powell goes to the UN to make a claim based on ONE testimony??
I don't get it. Where are all the false confessions that torture produces so reliably???
May 17, 2009 9:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
The CIA reported (still classified) in September 2002 it had “sources of varying reliability” for the claim that Iraq had provided “training in poisons and gases” to members of al-Qaeda.
We now know that al-Liby was the main source for that claim. We also know that the DIA had already serious doubts about that claim in February 2002. And yet, despite these doubts and the weakness of these "sources", these claims were used in October 2002 and in Powell's UN speech to bolster the case for war. That's how weak the case was. Not only about this claim, but about every other claim Bush and Cheney made in the run up to the war.
May 17, 2009 10:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Please stop this bullshit.
Wilkerson claims that Cheney has been torturing people for months to extract any confession that could be used as proof for Iraq links. In the process, he gets his facts wrong.
His claim is nevertheless is used to show torture as a key tool in producing false confessions to justify Iraq war.
Strangely, only one claim obtained from a detainee is used by Powell.
WHY??? If torture is so widespread and effective in producing false confessions, why wasn't more false confession extracted from dozens of detainees????
And why, in 2006, did the Senate Intelligence Committe produce the report on Iraq/al-Qaida connections that cited only claims obtained from ONE detainee?
http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf
I'm looking for pages and pages of debunked false confessions that were used as a rationale for Iraq war. But I can only find ONE.
WHY???
May 17, 2009 10:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, I know why.
It's because Wilkerson's personal grudge provides liberals with fuel with their pathological obsession with Bushco.
But I'm glad the proper sequence in the broken telephone between Wilkerson/Marshall/Dowd has now been properly established.
May 17, 2009 10:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another reason might be because the report authors were refused access to presidential daily briefs and established a baseline from "all-source" agencies. This was not a report that the administration was eager to participate in. We know that the "gang of 4/8" had exclusive access to stuff that this committee didn't, and it seems the "gangs" weren't even told everything.
It's not inconceivable stuff happened that didn't make it into that specific report.
That said, I think some of Wilkerson's assertions should be viewed with suspicion as well.
May 18, 2009 2:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why? That's too easy: because Republicans are incompetent at everything they do, even torture.
The confessions they had produced were so ridiculous and so easily debunked, they could not be used. Leaving them only with vague statements.
May 17, 2009 10:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The confessions"
- you're as good with facts as Wilkerson, as capable of embellishment as Marshall and as intelligent as Dowd.
Over and out.
May 17, 2009 11:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Over and out..."
Is that a promise? Forever and ever?
At least try to let a couple comments pop up before yours if you do return, it looks suspiciously like an overzealous professional to always be the first with the worst.
No doubt, you remain poised to poison at the drop of a post.
May 18, 2009 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me plagairize you, Lullo, just once for posterity, you said something very simple earlier that I am sure many would like you to consider yourself;
"Please stop this bullshit."
It stinks. It may make your circle jerk of fellow wannabe neocons patting you on the back, but most people are seriously ready for unity in government, not constant divisiveness for political gain.
May 18, 2009 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Shoplifting! Shoplifting? Now, why would I be shoplifting when I have over one-hundred dollars right here in my wallet? Makes no sense..."
Gobbledeygook.
May 18, 2009 9:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Lalo, your little fantasy that Cheney never ever used torture to drum up a fake link between Iraq and al Qaeda just got thoroughly busted:
McClatchy News
Cheney said in 2004 Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/68315.html
Now that you can read Dick's own admission, you'll have to give these juvenile attacks on Col. Wilkerson a rest. These war crimes were never about a ticking time bomb, just about Dick playing CYA.
May 18, 2009 10:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Awwww, the smoking gun....!!
Let me get this straight, Cheneye waterboarding SKM and Abu to get an Iraq confession....
Well, where is it?? Did you hear Powell or anyone else mention it?
Or do you think that perhaps all that torture wasn't enough for these two?
No Iraq confession at all, not even a false one?
Or something?
May 18, 2009 11:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
We keep hearing that it was "contractors" who did most of the torture, or am I mistaken?
Were those "contractors" answering to the CIA or to Cheney? Who was on the other end of their cell-phones...if not Cheney, was it someone who anwered directly to him?
We know he had a hit squad, maybe it is time for Congress to invite old Scattergun in for a conversation about those contractors and his connection to them.
May 18, 2009 1:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect that her ghostwriting interns / assistants are the ones that let this slip. I don't even think she writes things herself anymore, since she filed that story "from a New Hampshire town hall" when she was actually over the Atlantic on a plane with one of the campaigns.
JOSHUABLOG: You need to see OUTRAGE. It's extremely revealing about "happily married, straight men" in the Republican Party (mostly)...
OUTRAGE TRAILER: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKZE2qPaXIQ
May 17, 2009 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I want to see it. Definitely.
May 17, 2009 5:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Me too! Why haven't I heard about it before?
May 17, 2009 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
CVille - Might only be playing in NYC right now... Same Director as "This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated", so he's got some pull to make it more widely seen...
It's important to be reminded that then-RNC head Ken Mehlmen orchestrated W's "Anti-Adam & Steve" 2004 re-election strategy from the closet. It also helped me get agitated enough to call the White House to tell them to put a moratorium on DADT dismissals - losing Lt. Choi (sp?) is a travesty. (BTW - I was thinking; where are the straight members of his platoon demanding that they be kicked out too if their leader gets kicked out?)
The only thing I disagreed with in the film was at the end where the director states that Charlie Crist is a frontrunner for GOP President in 2012. That's farcical. No one would suggest that.
Also, Lindsey Graham isn't mentioned at all for some reason. I was surprised...
May 17, 2009 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it is just starting in DC too. I head something about it on NPR this week. Looked at the website and there was no video, very bare bones, not much information.
May 17, 2009 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, should read "heard" and not head above.
May 17, 2009 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's see, the film ought to make it to Oahu [Honolulu] by 2012, and to Maui by, say, 2015.
May 17, 2009 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great catch, joshua.
May 17, 2009 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dowd was the reporter who busted Biden's speech plagiarism. You think she'd know better.
May 17, 2009 5:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks. I updated the post to include that. h/t you.
May 17, 2009 6:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd forgotten about the Biden thing. Oh this is doubly choice!
May 17, 2009 6:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
who's going to report this to the NYTimes?
May 17, 2009 5:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I emailed the public editor.
May 17, 2009 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
It doesn't matter who if anyone reports it, there will be nothing done, as usual.
May 18, 2009 6:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's nothing I enjoy more than watching Maureen Dowd squirm
May 17, 2009 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wonder what kind of clever pun she's going to come up with to deflect the controversy?
May 17, 2009 6:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
lol... this is as good as steny hoyer and eric cantor sending out an email to supporters pleading on behalf of the poor downtrodden israelis without realizing that the attachment helpfully provided them by aipac should have been renamed to something other than: “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”
May 17, 2009 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
wow! Have you contacted the NYT and brought this to their attention?
Please keep us updated.
What's that the old adage? Something about the highest form of praise is 'stealing your prose'?(Paraphrasing of course!)
And I've heard hers are brass! Guess this proves it!
May 17, 2009 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ok. Now, who's the Queen of Timelines? emptywheel!
May 17, 2009 5:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
That quote should have been closed after the first phrase. So sorry. Clicked submit instead of preview!
My words start from: "So I don't doubt..."
May 17, 2009 5:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know TheraP, you may have point here. That referral of yours to emptywheel by the way, what a source indeed!
May 17, 2009 6:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe Dowd thought she could pick up her own Hillman this way...
She certainly wasn't thinking. The latter has become a bit of a habit for her.
May 17, 2009 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent catch!
Modo is a lightweight more interested in gossip and being catty about public figures like a 13 year old girl than she is in news or policy or politics. Now we have evidence she is a plagiarizer! Fantastic! I hope she is canned right away and they put an adult in her place.
May 17, 2009 5:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Busted.
Epically busted.
May 17, 2009 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
If HuffPo needs another 125 Point Font Headline, this should be it...
May 17, 2009 6:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very nice catch, Joshua. Let's see what the NYT's Gossip Girl has to say for herself.
May 17, 2009 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
May 17, 2009 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fame is so fleeting...
May 17, 2009 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
fifteen minutes...
May 17, 2009 8:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
If this had been Kraphammer, Brooks, or Broder it would have been epic, but this is still pretty fucking good. Eviscerate her.
May 17, 2009 6:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
As an aside, what did everyone here think of Maureen Dowd's article?
May 17, 2009 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just as good as some others I read (pretty much saying the same things).
Actually, I rarely read her and did think it was pretty good in spite of her usual (I understand) sniping and snarkiness.
May 17, 2009 8:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
This allegation of pagliarism, if true, needs to be made big in order to sink Dowd, who is partly responsible for the smearing of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, and blowing out of proportion Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinksky.
May 17, 2009 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why on earth would she do this?
The only vaguely reasonable explanations I can come up with:
- Insanity
- Misplaced belief that she wouldn't get caught
- Some sort of cry for help
May 17, 2009 6:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well to be fair, she did have to discard her whole soap opera crap with the evil Clintons trying to destroy Obambi, so she's been wanting for a little creative inspiration.
May 17, 2009 8:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Relax everyone. It's easy to see how it happens. She copies swathes of text from various articles into a text file so she can riff offa them to write her article. One para from Josh gets mixed up and she inserts it as her own after a minor edit, believing she wrote the sentences. It's not like she copied the whole article. One para does not qualify as an indictable offence.
May 17, 2009 6:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unless she gets indicted, that is.
May 17, 2009 9:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
A word-for-word quotation like that without any sourcing or even use of quotation marks to indicate the words are not your own would get you an automatic failing grade if you turned it in as a school paper, and could possibly subject you to disciplinary action.
Her excuse is pitifully weak. So she meant to plagiarize her friend instead of Josh Marshall? This is an excuse?
May 18, 2009 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow you've really uncovered the craft of a writer with absolutely nothing original to say....
May 19, 2009 10:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Supposedly Dowd has responded elsewhere to this charge--with an explanation and a promise of credit/correction.
http://www.nytpick.com/2009/05/dowd-admits-plagiarism-to-nytpicker.html
But if that's really her explanation, it's bogus. Doesn't explain how this went in word-for-word almost. Come on--that's serious stuff for a columnist. Inexcusable.
May 17, 2009 7:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, it's not the crime, it's the coverup.
We've all made some kind of cut-and-paste error. Why couldn't she just have the balls to admit it, instead of floating this obvious lie? Go figure.
May 17, 2009 8:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like I say, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. We've all made some kind of cut-and-paste error. Why couldn't she just have the cojones to admit it?
May 18, 2009 2:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Everybody just back off Maureen.
I say, to plagiarize Shirley Maclaine in Steel Magnolias, these guys are evil and must be destroyed.
If it takes two mainstream sources to echo useful sentiment nearly verbatim so it sticks, well that is fine by me.
For the sake of the majority of readers, I just hope it spins out these two had some kind of MAD agreement to do this, so we can continue repeating the excerpt in question FOR DAYS.
Maybe she just wants to remind Cheney just how long a way it is from Tipperary to Lean Cuisines. With due credit to Sam Mendes, Alan Ball and Chris Cooper, Me too, Maureen. Me too.
May 17, 2009 7:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's what makes it worse. In the one column that leaves aside the albeit very important matter of which nickname best suits Obama and instead discusses one of the gravest issues facing the country, she goes and lifts the support for her argument verbatim. Considering the significance of the subject matter, could she at least not have taken a little bit more care in writing her piece?
May 17, 2009 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just read MD's column for today, which now ends with this: "An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo."
May 17, 2009 8:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
attribute? Doesn't it require Josh's permission? He could require it to be redacted.
May 17, 2009 8:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
That would be Fair Use, excerpting, no permission needed. Just like Josh does here, and we do.
May 17, 2009 9:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here it is:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/17/maureen-dowd-admits-inadv_n_204418.html
May 17, 2009 8:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh! Oh!
This afternoon, a blogger named Joshua (not Marshall) at TPM Cafe claimed that a paragraph in Dowd's Sunday column matches a paragraph from Josh Marshall's story that appeared on TPM last Thursday.
Way to go, Joshua!
May 17, 2009 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Awesome!!! Good work, Joshua, and it's good to have you back. I do, however, miss that gorgeous old avatar of yours....
;)
May 17, 2009 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Glad she cleared that up. So, she didn't plagiarize J. M. She plagiarized a "friend" who plagiarized J.M.
May 17, 2009 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry - her story is really thin.
If she was taking notes during the conversation with her friend (which she must have in order to reproduce Marshall's thought verbatim, with her own "Bush crowd" thrown in), then she should be able to quickly produce those notes. If it was an e-mail from a friend that she copied and pasted, even better.
But the thing that makes this story stink from the moment I read it is that if she supposedly got this idea from a friend, why didn't she attribute it to the friend instead of representing it as her own thought? And why wouldn't she at least do a Google search for the paragraph to make sure her friend didn't lift the thought from another source? Especially considering that she had at least two days to do this before it went to print, the lack of due diligence is really striking.
The greater likelihood is that she's full of shit.
May 17, 2009 8:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was wondering that, too, since her excuse implies that stealing from a friend without attribution is okay. The excuse seems more embarrassing than the initial faux pas.
May 17, 2009 10:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ok, I have it figured out. The Times has taken away a percentage of everyone's salaries. MoDo had to plagiarize in order to make up for that missing 10% - or whatever...
May 17, 2009 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I saw this at Dkos and rushed over to this site. My jaw dropped. This is unbelievable and so is her explanation.
May 17, 2009 9:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't see anything in her explanation that seems particularly dubious. I post on forums all the time where someone copy/pastes something and may forget to properly attribute it, and the fact that she made an apology and a proper attribution seems like the right thing to do. If this becomes a chronic thing on her behalf then okay, sure, it'd seem odd, but does Maureen Dowd have a history of plagiarism? Seems like a non-story to me.
May 17, 2009 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is your point? At any reputable University (for example University of Virginia, since I am in Charlottesville) it would be grounds for expulsion.
Could there be innocent explanations? Could it be that there is just too much "stuff" out there to control it all? Maybe MoDo would have a new view of how it could happen; after all, she 'outed' Joe Biden for much less.
Why should MoDo, who "outed" Joe Biden get off?
I am waiting for an answer.
May 17, 2009 9:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would hope that the citation standards for an NYT column are a little higher than for a comments board of some random blog.
May 17, 2009 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, the outrage should come from Josh Marshall if he feels it necessary. And I say Whoppeee for TMP getting great publicity!
May 17, 2009 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can we please put a moratorium on calling every legitimate criticism "outrage"? It's getting beyond tiresome. No one I've read so far here is being remotely hysterical or unduly angry about this situation.
May 17, 2009 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
This was totally awesome and impressive.
Did I mention impressive? Awesome?
May 17, 2009 9:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Also.
May 17, 2009 10:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
What's Josh Marshall's view on this?
May 17, 2009 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is absolutely absurd to even suggest a paragraph runs pracitcally identical to another yet was never seen by the thief but was her own formulation of the point relayed by a friend of hers. Ever play the game of whispering around a circle to see how mangled a simple sentence can be at the end of several repetitions? Wanta bet how many changes a whole paragraph would go through with even one repeat?
Doris Kearns rode out her own controversy with the claim she had just confused notes she had taken from someone else's book and her own private musings, so this may go away as well. But it reeks. If she had admitted to a elided credit, it would all have gone down without notice. Remember Nixon was not brought down by the breakin itself...
May 17, 2009 10:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have to agree. She copied a 45-word sentence, changing only 1 word, and we are supposed to think this was due to a conversation with a friend?
Personally, I would find it hard to exactly recall a 15-word sentence somebody had said to me. More likely I would internalize it and change the language significantly to my own thoughts.
So yes, this is plagiarism.
May 17, 2009 11:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
If a dictionary has, say 10.000 words, and a sentence begins with the same word, the random chance of that is 10, 000:1, if the seond word is that same, that chances are 1,000,000:1, and if 45 words are exactly the same, in a random sample, the odds are astronomical. I don't have enough paper for all the zeroes, but the Zom-Bushes will believe anything that supports another in their Party ... anything. Saddam with Osama, Saddam with WMD, ticking time bombs, mushroom clouds, you name it!
May 18, 2009 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, except that the words in a sentence are not random picks from the entire universe of possible word choices. Context constricts the possibilities considerably, and grammar and syntax constrict them even further. Not that there are not still many possible ways to express the same basic idea, but you cannot treat the choice of words in a sentence as if you are generating random numbers.
May 18, 2009 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Squad puddle nickname ineluctably from if!
May 19, 2009 4:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
You don't have to know you've been pliagiarized for it to be a really bad thing for a known writer to have done. Even if she pliagiarized a dead writer. Doesn't matter. She took credit for it as if it was her own.
Dear... dear... dear... Not good, Maureen, not after all the folks you've dragged through the coals over the years... umm..... not good, I'm very sorry to tell you.
May 17, 2009 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can't even spell plagiarized correctly... oh well. ;(
May 17, 2009 10:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just to be clear: she talked to a friend a week ago and the friend just happened to quote the exact words from TPM, and then she just happened to type them into her column verbatim? How dumb does she think people are? And how small do you have to be to try an excuse like that?
A pathetic cut and paste error from a collection of notes and ideas would be evidence--as if we needed it--of her intellectual laziness. But I think her excuse makes clear that this was a flat-out case of theft. She intended, at best, to paraphrase and lost the rewrite in the shuffle. Just as likely: she doesn't consider the internets as anything but an ephemeral backwater--so figured she could just drop in a graf here and there. Think there's more to be found? I do.
May 17, 2009 11:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
So she didn't intend to rip off Josh Marshall. She intended to rip off her friend?
Dowd has always been faking it when it comes to the discussion of grown-up politics. This just makes it official.
You know this is why it is so important that we save the newspaper industry. The blogosphere will never be an adequate substitute for this kind of unsurpassed Gray Lady quality.
May 18, 2009 12:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
</snark>.
:-)
May 18, 2009 6:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
As a reader of this blog and a sometimes reader of MoDo, I'll go on record as saying the NY Times Columnist has credited Josh before (though I can't recall the instance(s).
I do remember Josh giving her props for a fine piece in the Times Book Review on Arthur Schlesinger's Journals.
So I do think it was a mistake. But the explanation is too lame to be believable. Anyway, it's her story, so I guess she's sticking to it.
Josh's non-gloating takes the prize for magnanimous inadvertent content provider.
May 18, 2009 1:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
There's a way Maureen Dowd could try to come clean on this: Share her IP address(es).
If she provides those, then those IPs could be looked up against the web server logs, and if the IP(s) isn't / aren't on there, well, good on her.
May 18, 2009 2:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ha ha ha LOL...I like this...newspaper industry must be saved guys......
Sachin
May 18, 2009 4:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
This seems to be getting a lot of play. It's on the front page of Yahoo and the AJC website this morning.
Great work, Joshua!
May 18, 2009 9:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
NYTimes hacks steal plenty of story ideas from TPM too. I wish they'd hurry up and go out of business.
May 18, 2009 10:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why is Dowd still employed?
May 18, 2009 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
You stole it from that girl, Maureen Dowd's daughter, that you keep on the side, you lying envious mere *blogger*.
If you were a *real* journalist, you'd write for the NYTimes and plagiarize losers like yourself.
So there, you graphomaniac.
Why on earth would she do this?
The only vaguely reasonable explanations I can come up with:
- Insanity
- Misplaced belief that she wouldn't get caught
- Some sort of cry for help
Let us not exclude sheer stupidity. Or very dense stupidity. Or subatomic quantum foaming stupidity. Or a Valium coma. Or...
May 18, 2009 11:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Heh. I plagiarized a comment poster. I rule!
May 18, 2009 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
This raises the same question that I had about the Bush admin:
How do they think they can get away with it?
And I have another one for Ms. Dowd, "why copy the paragraph almost completely intact?" She only changed the word "we" for "the Bush crowd" ("we" is more accurate). She could have Just taken the idea, put it in her own words and given credit for the information to Marcy and Josh. This is just so sloppy, lazy and inexcusable.
May 18, 2009 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Lalo35adm:
Nice professional smoke-screen. Who's paying you?
May 18, 2009 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Emulation is the highest form of compliment?
This isn't simply plagiarism, it's pure cut and paste.
Although you have to give the old girl credit for plagiarizing a very pertinent piece of information.
May 18, 2009 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yow-za!
She may be trying to fix the intelligence to fit the actions.
We need an independent commission to investigate how this occurred, at once. Get Michael Steele on the horn.
[rable,rable,rable,rable,rable.......]
May 18, 2009 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well Maureen Dowd's story about getting the passage from a friend over the phone itself wouldn't speak well of her. (Even if her "friend" hadn't told her she read it in TPM's blog, what is she doing copying her friend's thoughts word for word and passing them off as her own?)
But I doubt that's what happened. My hunch is that Maureen Dowd's lazy assistant cut and pasted a sentence and forgot to alter it significantly before passing the first draft to Dowd, who then injected her vaunted bons mots, pressed send, and went to a cocktail party. It seems to me that Dowd wants people to know that she's not the plagiarist without admitting that she doesn't write her columns in their entirety.
May 18, 2009 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
anymore...
May 18, 2009 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Rather than act like a rabid repuglican, I'll give her the courtesy of time to post the correction and apology before I past judgment.
May 18, 2009 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just another example of how the NYTimes has lost it's credibility. It was above noted, why is she still working? Well, she could work somehwere, but the NYTimes? I would suggest those days are ended. She clearly stole the quote and that is beneath the expectation of the NYTimes. I am sure there are dozens of other writers that would come up with thoughtful original material or have the decency to attribute quote to material written by others.
Again, the first deed was wrong, but now this cover-up? C'mon? Your the Times not the Post. The readers are not THAT stupid, and to suggest otherwise, that they should accept this lamest of excuses is really offensive. It does not justice to their readershipt to insult them this way.
May 18, 2009 3:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dowd has been trolling sites for a while now, since her mind went blank after years of 'Poppy' and the 'Boy King.' Since Obama Campaign, she's been dry.
So. she trolls. She thinks she is stealing from anon. sources. She has gotten away with 7,8,9 cribs, thefts unnoticed, since the campaign.
It probly happned the way she said: "A friend." (She did not take it directly; some blogger cribbed it w/out sourcing it and she stole it from that person.)
How do I know this? I have proof of many of her thefts of phrases, ideas, references...will post a few
May 19, 2009 8:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dowd has been trolling sites for a while now, since her mind went blank after years of 'Poppy' and the 'Boy King.' Since Obama Campaign, she's been dry.
So. she trolls. She thinks she is stealing from anon. sources. She has gotten away with 7,8,9 cribs, thefts unnoticed, since the campaign.
It probly happned the way she said: "A friend." (She did not take it directly; some blogger cribbed it w/out sourcing it and she stole it from that person.)
How do I know this? I have proof of many of her thefts of phrases, ideas, references...will post a few
May 19, 2009 9:01 AM | Reply | Permalink