Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times, which is part of a phenomenon that used to be known as “newspapers.” Last Sunday she straight-up plagiarized a paragraph from blogger Josh Marshall. Here’s the paragraph:
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.
This scintillating prose appeared in her column several days after appearing on Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog. No attribution, no quotation marks, no indication whatsoever that it was someone else’s work. She can make all the excuses she wants, but it’s plagiarism, plain and simple.
Normally, I’d care about Dowd’s writing, and cut-and-pasting, almost as much as I care who won Dancing with the Stars. Which is to say, less than not much. But this little oopsie does bring up a good point about the culture of the NYT.
As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan points out:
Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt! Then let’s point out that the NYT is one of the loudest newspaper voices bemoaning the idea that they create all the original content and the internet rips it off, in a one-way downhill dance of media thievery. In fact, the NYT itself has a grand tradition of stealing stories from smaller regional papers, parachuting in their own correspondents to re-report and repackage those stories for a national audience.
All papers do that! But none as well as the Times. And just as blogs use NYT stories for raw material, the paper does the same; since they’re too straitlaced to stray from polite discourse, they’ll just pull what they want to say from a blog, i.e. “Rupert Murdoch has always had his detractors; Snark-purveying wags at Gawker even described Mr. Murdoch as a ‘piss-drinking mummy’ and insinuated he had sexual relations with several lowland gorillas on a trip abroad, though that could not be independently verified.”
I’d go a step further: They’re not above ripping off original research done by blogs.
Last summer, after the National Enquirer caught John Edwards red-handed leaving Rielle Hunter’s hotel room, we were one of the few blogs that looked into the story. (Hey, the networks and newspapers weren’t.) As far as Google can determine, Deceiver.com was the first place that went into any detail on Hunter’s friend and colleague Bob McGovern, a California “healer and intuitive” who rented the room at the Beverly Hilton and drove Hunter and Edwards there separately for their late-night rendezvous. The guy was smack dab in the middle of the story, but nobody seemed to know much about him.
We were able to track down more information on the mysterious McGovern by checking the cache of a recently deleted page on the website of Margaret Sweet, another New Age palm-reading associate of Hunter. Sweet, or someone, tried to cover up that information. If we hadn’t dug it up, it would have been successfully wiped off the Internet. Just like a lot of other “now ya see it, now ya don’t” online information surrounding that story.
Our post about all this was published on July 31. On Aug. 10, Serge F. Kovaleski published a remarkably similar story about McGovern in the NYT. The only place Kovaleski could have gotten the information about McGovern and Sweet was Deceiver, as explained in detail here.
Yep, we did the research for a New York Times reporter and got no credit for it. All it would’ve taken was something like, “…as discovered by the blog Deceiver.com.” Other media outlets, like People and the New York Daily News, had no problem giving us the proper attribution for our work on the Edwards/Hunter story. But for some reason the mighty New York Times, which had completely ignored the whole thing for weeks, didn’t think it was important to acknowledge the people who had been picking up their slack. We were beneath their notice.
It really puts this Maureen Dowd thing in perspective. The policy of the NYT, apparently, is that if the information came from the Internet, there’s no need to acknowledge the human beings responsible for it. It’s just a machine, right? The only difference between Serge Kovaleski and Dowd is that he didn’t actually cut-and-paste any of our text. Which was too bad, because it would’ve made his stolen story a bit more readable.
But hey, whatever sells newspapers, right? Good luck with that, jerks.
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lmao@her excuse:
“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.”
yeah…when I weave someone else’s ideas into my writing in a cogent and a spontaneous way, I somehow repeat everything I stole…I mean, wove, word for word as well.
If I ever am accused of plagiarism I’m going to claim it is purely coincidental. By the way, I’m writing a book. It’s a novel set in Russia during the Napoleonic Era. I’m calling it ‘War And Peace’. I hope it becomes a best seller.
This doesn’t surprise me a bit; MD was always a vapid talking head with an inflated sense of her own self-importance. Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?
I really appreciate the work you guys did on the whole Rielle Hunter thing.
C’mon, ya’ll – she reads the story with her left eye, and the source of it with her right eye, which was probably hampered at the time, based on her picture.
There’s a nice piece here about how Maureen made a name for herself in the late 80s by calling out Joe Biden for plagiarizing other politicos’ rhetoric: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1440
Oh, and Patrick, do you know that old Russian joke (I don’t know how widespread it ever was in English)–
A teacher in Russia quizzes his students and asks one, “Who wrote War and Peace?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t write it,” the student says.
The teacher complains to a fellow teacher who is a secret KGB agent that students are so disrespectful, and tells him the story. The KGB agent dutifully reports it to his superior.
The next week, both the student and the teacher are missing. The agent asks his superior what happened to his fellow teacher. The superior says, “We arrested both the student and the teacher, and last night they confessed they wrote it together!”
(I might be remembering it a bit wrongly, but that’s the general idea…)
Don’t forget Jayson Blair and his portfolio of 53 articles with imaginary or unlocateable subjects, many of which were published in the New York Times before he was fired.
Remember when the New York Times had “John Edwards” as the number one topic on their most searched list for 30 days, yet had refused to write an article about his affair?
Taken in light of the Jayson Blair thing, and Rick Bragg stealing work from an unnamed–and IIRC, unpaid–stringer, this points up a culture of corruption firmly entrenched at the NYT. Yeah, yeah, Blair and Bragg are no longer there, I know. That this stuff is still going on, and is allowed to go on there, serves in aid of my point.
Even if she did cadge it from a ‘friend’ should she not have given the friend credit?
Absolutely nothing is going to happen to Dowd, in fact she will probably win a pulitzer.
I think I will stick to Deciever to get the real news from now on. Reporters no longer investigate and then report. They just report and then provide us with an opinion that we neither asked for or want.
The New York Times is a real thing? C’mon you guys are just making stuff up now.
AAW – You are so right. I have not read an article where it the reporting is unbiased and professional in years.
A “journalist” for our local paper – M. Album – got busted several times for “imaginary interviews”. Now he doesn’t even stick to sports on Sundays – he tells me how I should feel on all sorts of non-related matters. But I guess once you get a book published and a lifetime movie deal it doesn’t if you “fake” some of your interviews.
I can say I have never read nor ever plan on reading anything from the NYT. The testiment to their ineptitude is shown on CNN and MSNBC every night when they have their “columnist” on there spouting their opinion. Most of them are so predictable in what they are going to say it isn’t even worth watching.
Rielle Hunter is doing a Barbara Walters interview in early June.
S-w-e-e-t…
I totally agree AAW! And the other day, Babbawawa had the audactiy to accuse Glenn Beck of not investigating the facts before he speaks his opinions, just because he said that he does not call himself an “investigative reporter”, but rather a commentator of current events. But she has no problems with the New York Slimes that I’ve ever seen or heard. :-p
I used to buy the NYT on Tuesdays for the Tuesday science section, but I couldn’t keep that up for long on principle.
Anyone else think Mo bears a striking resemblence to Patricia Field here, with slightly less crazy hair?
http://pictures.thaindian.com/d/2941-2/Patricia-Field-82475190.jpg
I get the NYT newsfeed daily on my email but lately have considered switching, especially after looking at the Comments section of any given op-ed piece. There’s only so much “Obama-is-the-greatest-Bush-is-a-war-criminal” blather I can take on any given day.
How can the NY Times justify it’s existence if you really can read it all on the internet from original sources?
You’re dead on Nati about her story not holding any water. Her friend repeated it verbatim and then she remembered and wrote her friend’s point verbatim?
Apparently we just need to let go
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/john-farrell/2009/05/19/maureen-dowd-made-a-mistake-and-corrected-it-time-to-move-on.html
Stan, kind of like most of Obama’s administration who just “forgot” to pay their taxes. See, wit them it is just an innocent mistake. For others, hell hath no fury.
Do you think anyone at the New York Times will ever say they wrote “Bad Motor Scooter”? Because THAT would be funny.
Would it really be that difficult to reword that paragraph?! I mean, I wouldn’t be in favor of that either (just credit the thought, as was said) but if you’re going to do something wrong, at least be smart about it!
I might work for a small, small town paper, but I take pride in my accurate, unbiased reporting and don’t comprehend how/why anyone else wouldn’t want to too.
Kristine–my husband, who almost took a newspaper job in Lafayette, TN a few years back, tells me that small (local) newspapers are the only ones staying afloat these days. Apparently people trust them, as long as they tend to stick to local news and don’t join the Manson Family. Er, I mean, Obama fanclub.
Beige, unfortunately, my local paper is owned by the NYT and may go out of business later this year.
I guess there’s always the Herald or the Telegram-Gazette. *Sigh*
BF Syndrome (Bitch Face Syndrome), you know Shannon D, Couric, Rosie (if she is actually female, who the hell knows what that pig really is)…you get the point. Maureen Dowd…BF Syndrome…nuff said.
Next Please!
@MC Mom: Aww. Maybe that too-small lifeboat is why so many employees at the NYT are looting and pillaging other people’s work.
Looks like another NYT writer has been caught–not plagiarizing, but leaving out a basic fact that completely undermines his story of financial woe: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/the_road_to_bankruptcy.php