Wow: Maureen Dowd plagiarizes lefty blogger? Update: I got it from a “friend,” says Dowd

posted at 7:45 pm on May 17, 2009 by Allahpundit
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I added the question mark to be on the safe side but there’s really no doubt about it. Josh Marshall, writing at TPM on Thursday:

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.

And Dowd, today:

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 makes twice in the span of four days that a major newspaper’s been caught cribbing material from nutroots blogs, which stands to reason. According to a survey of more than 200 journalists recently conducted at BYU, “despite equal awareness [of lefty and righty blogs], journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.” Contain your surprise.

For example, more journalists know about Michelle Malkin than Talking Points. Yet twice as many journalists actually read Talking Points than read Michelle Malkin.

“When journalists take story ideas from blogs, those ideas naturally will come from blogs they read,” Davis said. “These reading patterns suggest journalists may be getting primarily one view of the blogosphere.”

They’re taking more than just ideas, champ. In fact, the beauty of MoDo’s snafu is that not only does it show a major player in the media being led around by nutroots talking points, it involves her lifting stuff from a blog that’s actually called “Talking Points.” Glorious. Exit question: Any predictions as to what her excuse will be? I’m guessing she’ll say she was copy/pasting material when researching the article and she hit paste in the wrong document and then forgot that she didn’t write that bit and somehow the Times’s five layers of fact-checking or whatever didn’t recognize the quote — which is surprising, really, given that they’re all probably TPM readers too. All theories welcome, though. Oh, to be a JournoList member tonight!

I posted this clip last week but a fresh viewing might be warranted under the circumstances.

Update: A site about NYT gossip claims to have obtained a statement from Dowd. It’s unspeakably lame so I’m guessing, yeah, it’s authentic.

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.

I.e. “I didn’t mean to rip off Josh Marshall, I meant to rip off my friend.” I’m curious as to how this exchange with her “friend” went, precisely. Presumably they were chatting casually and whoever it was read Marshall’s quote and she said, “Great point! Say that again!” and he/she repeated it … verbatim, and slowly while MoDo scribbled it down. Has that ever happened to you while making chitchat? Someone asks you to repeat a point you made and you restate it … word for word?

Update: Ah, a more reasonable possibility from the comments: When she says she was “talking” to a friend, she might mean IMing. The friend could have copy/pasted it without attribution and she thought it was an original idea. Even so, though, when I want to use something someone’s said to me in casual conversation, I always frame it as “As a friend said to me the other day” or some similar formulation. The alternative is to ask their permission to treat the idea as your own, but presumably she didn’t do that in this case or else the friend would have said where he got it from.

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