… with UD’s immediate, uncensored, unedited reactions in parenthesis:
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. [Wish I’d been that blogger.] [And they wonder why newspapers are dying.]
Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. [A moral error, to be sure. Hard to see – paging Doris Kearns Goodwin! – how it could have been done in error. We call this plagiarism.] The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. [I read him all the time during the presidential election.]
The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday. A request for comment made by The Associated Press was not immediately returned by the Times late Sunday. [Sluggish, as always. Bloggers are quicker. And they usually come up with their own material.]
The error appeared in Dowd’s Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration’s use of interrogation methods in the run-up to the Iraq war.
In the 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.”
Marshall last week wrote virtually the same sentence. But where Dowd’s column used the phrase “the Bush crowd was,” Marshall used “we were.” [The “Bush crowd” change makes it clear that this was not a mistaken importation of someone else’s sentence. She — UD bets it was one of her assistants — took the sentence and gussied it up a bit. UD bets that, like all those Harvard law professors who plagiarize, Dowd’s a victim of her dependence on assistants who do much of her writing for her. She sweeps in toward deadline, perhaps, and Dowdizes it here and there, and she relies on her staff to write the body of the thing and not to plagiarize while they’re doing it. This is the most elite form of plagiarism, if that’s any comfort to Dowd.]
Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told the Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall’s post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall’s blog. [Well. Now we’re paging Nancy Pelosi. UD‘s a big fan of Pelosi, but she doesn’t believe her version of events in terms of what she knew about torture.]
In the updated version on the Times’ site, Dowd’s column had this note: “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 17th, 2009 at 11:16PM
Here’s MoDo’s explanation to the Huffington Post.
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.
That is just plain odd. Did she take notes while she was talking to the friend? Was the friend reading from the blog to her? My guess is that she’s protecting an assistant.
Anyway, MoDO played a big role in the Biden plagiarism scandal awhile back.
May 17th, 2009 at 11:31PM
"Bloggers are quicker. And they usually come up with their own material."
What about the majority of blogging that’s just quoting or linking to other people’s material? Does anyone hold blogs (with the exception of the handful of high-profile Andrew Sullivans) nearly as accountable as we hold print journalism? Would anyone notice or care if joeschmoe.blogspot.com turned out to be an amalgamation of various WaPo columns rather than Joe Schmoe’s own inspired wisdom?
Plagiarism is bad. But I don’t think blogging will abolish it.
Also, her assistant (she only has one–hard times at the NYT) doesn’t write her columns.
May 18th, 2009 at 12:21AM
Oh, I don’t think blogging will abolish plagiarism either. But blogging might abolish newspapers if they’re as sluggish and evasive in response to plagiarism and other problems as the NYT is being here.
There are plenty of lazy unappetizing bloggers out there to be sure, but it’s no accident that Dowd found her sentence among the best of the blog writers, rather than from a fellow newspaper person. This is a perfect example of what people like Andrew Sullivan have been talking about for ages — established print media might disdain blogs, but blogs are nimble and clever and quick in a way it’s very hard for print to be, and it’s not surprising therefore to find that an established newspaper person is ripping off a blogger.
As to the assistant question: It’s murky, isn’t it? The line between doing research for a high-profile writer (like the Harvard law professors I’m using as an example) and providing occasional sentences can be pretty blurry. As I say in my post, it’s just my guess that Dowd’s assistant sometimes blurs that line, and that plagiarism may in this case have resulted.
May 18th, 2009 at 1:03AM
This isn’t plagiarism.
It’s just a simple mistake.
I mean, how can anyone be expected to take accurate notes and be precise with where exactly something was read. It’s just too hard! There’s just SO MUCH out there, so how can ANYONE be expected to keep track of where you read stuff?
**********
These are paraphrases of the arguments my students used to give to me when I caught them plagiarizing in writing assignments.
Most of them were usually given a pass by the adminisbots who handled the grade appeals. It’s also why I quit teaching.
How much do you want to bet this "assistant" [‘cuz I bet you’re right…does anyone really think Dowd reads blogs? And doesn’t she realize that admitting she borrowed the quote from some unnamed friend makes her look almost as bad?] got a few similar passes in college when s/he should have failed for plagiarism?
I mean, in the end, who’s the incompetent one here? The research flunky for sure…but Dowd used the flunky’s work without double-checking or possibly even questioning it! It’s not as if the clause she poached trips off the tongue, ya know? It’s peculiar.
May 18th, 2009 at 6:14AM
Ghost writers in the sky…
May 18th, 2009 at 7:51AM
But isn’t it striking how many of the biggest bloggers were or still are either established print journalists, authors, academics, or professionals (lawyers, policy-makers, etc) who already write for at least part of their living? Andrew Sullivan is a perfect example of this kind of trajectory. He was the editor of TNR before he was a blogger–how can he see himself in opposition to established newspaperman? There are no such quotes to be found from fellow-newspaper people because such opinion writing is not the primary purpose of newspapers.
But they can be held accountable for plagiarism in a way that bloggers really can’t, or at least not yet. Consider the potential consequences for plagiarizing your blog–some angry comments, followed by a comment apology? Or a nimble deletion of the post and denial of its existence? Would your employer sanction you? Would you be publicly shamed? Highly doubtful. Institutions might be slow or craven in owning up to their misdeeds, but blogs can avoid it altogether because they’re accountable to no one, their authors are totally or semi-anonymous, and they can appear and disappear instantly. No school kid would be blamed for citing the NYT if the article turned out to be false, but if he cited Joe Schmoe, who turned out to be a liar, he would be faulted for having believed everything he reads on the internet.
May 18th, 2009 at 8:06AM
I have heard the "I must have accidentally memorized it and then forgotten the source" excuse about a million times. Since many of these students can barely remember their own names, "accidentally" would indeed be the operative word. One young lady, a stereotypically blond and perky cheerleader with the IQ of a carrot, once claimed to have memorized and regurgitated verbatim five densely written pages on Jan Hus, including the British spellings of the original text.
May 18th, 2009 at 8:55AM
Rita: I agree with much of what you’ve written, but would take issue with the idea that important blogs (we’ve already noted the existence of millions of unimportant and sometimes lazily written blogs, but that’s not the focus here) are accountable to no one.
On the contrary, major blogs take much bigger hits when they make mistakes or plagiarize, because fellow bloggers, and the readers of blogs, come after them without any of the institutional padding that protects, say, a Jason Blair. Look how long it took for the NYT to deal with him. He’d have been pelted to death in minutes by the blog world. If he’d had a blog, he could have, of course, continued to write it. But no one would read it.
May 18th, 2009 at 9:38AM
I think you are being too kind to "Rita" UD. Indeed, it makes sense that "Rita" is coming to MoDo’s defense because neither one of them appears to know what they are writing about. (The exception is when MoDo writes about her shoes, about which I concede she knows a very great deal). On blogs, and websites in general, the interconnectedness (it’s all tubes!)aids in sniffing out plagiarism very quickly. It is why MoDo’s dip in the plagiarism pool was identified and went ’round the world even before the NYT could print a correction. This is the nature of the web. As a result, bloggers do not tend to simply plagiarize others (linking with attribution is part of the game)and they are jumped on at the speed of light when they do.
This is not just limited to high-traffic, high-profile sites, either. Several of the cases of plagiarism that I’m aware of involve personal blog posts stolen by someone else and reposted as their own. It is so glaringly obvious when it happens that the scorn of the community is quick and harsh. Unlike what happens to plagiarists at the NYT and the MSM generally.
May 18th, 2009 at 9:45AM
Added: here’s the start of the trail when there is plagiarism of a relatively minor (but very good!) personal blog:
http://thisfish.ivillage.com/love/archives/2006/06/an-open-letter-to-beth-in-hous.html
May 18th, 2009 at 10:52AM
Shane, I’m not interested in defending Maureen Dowd from charges of plagiarism, though I do in fact "know"–in that old-fashioned, non-blog speculation kind of way–that her assistant does not write her columns. Nor am I suggesting that blogs can’t catch plagiarists as fast or faster than print journalism. My point is that it’s much easier for plagiarists to evade the consequences of plagiarism on the internet. Jayson Blair is now infamous and his career is ruined. If Andrew Sullivan were caught plagiarizing, his fate would be similar because he’s a real journalist writing under the imprimatur of a real publication. But Beth in Houston? Well, she can delete the post, pretend it never happened, or just start another blog under another name. Even if she does nothing, I doubt her employer will even consider sanctioning her for misconduct, nor will her personal reputation be tainted. That’s not accountability.
May 18th, 2009 at 12:49PM
"Rita"–OK, so the consequences of plagiarism are much greater for those who are "real journalist"s for "real publication"s. (Aside: what do either of those terms actually mean anymore? USN&WR, or whatever it has become, is now totally online, IIRC. Is it real?) As opposed to Beth in Houston who just called down an almighty virtual shitstorm on herself for stealing someone’s words. Only it is demonstrably not so: what do you think will happen to MoDo? What has happened to Kearns Goodwin, as UD pointed out?
Blair is an exception, and he only went down because Raines did too.
But in fact I agree that this should be so: if your stock and trade is the truth, or even your own opinion, you should be held to the highest standard of truth-telling. Which is why, in the example I gave, This Fish (at least until recently) was paid to share her words online, while not even her brother is reading Beth in Houston’s blog, if there is one.