Author: Dan Kennedy

Last thoughts (probably) on Maureen Dowd

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt today largely absolves columnist Maureen Dowd, writing, “I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.”

Over the past week, I’ve thought a lot about plagiarism in the context of teaching journalism students. So it’s relevant to point out that, at Northeastern, we define plagiarism as “intentionally representing the words, ideas, or data of another as one’s own … without providing proper citation.” Based on what we now know, I sort of agree and sort of disagree that Dowd did not plagiarize. And I definitely agree that what she did wasn’t right.

When the news broke that Dowd had copied more than 40 words from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo without quotation marks and without attribution, my first thought was that bloggers would pore over everything Dowd had written to see if they could find other examples. Well, it’s been a week, and the Marshall incident still stands alone. I don’t think it’s plausible that Dowd would suddenly start plagiarizing at the age of 57. So not only is this a first-time offense, but it speaks, I think, to a lack of malice aforethought on her part.

Earlier in the week, I and other commentators wrote that we had a hard time believing Dowd could be telling the truth when she said she had somehow managed to insert Marshall’s words, almost verbatim, based on a casual conversation she’d had with a friend. She has now clarified that, telling Hoyt she’d exchanged e-mails with a friend — still unnamed — and then copied and pasted his or her thoughts from the e-mail into her column.

That is a pretty lame way to write a column, and as Hoyt says, readers have a right to expect that a columnist, as opposed to a news reporter, will use her own words except when quoting others. Dowd’s editor, Andrew Rosenthal, disagrees.

Now, this may surprise readers who’ve never worked in a newsroom, but Rosenthal’s take is pretty much in sync with the way journalists work. As an editor, I have written whole paragraphs into opinion pieces by people with well-known bylines. As a writer, I’ve had editors do the same with me. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that journalism is a collaborative process; it’s another to have friends help you write your column, and then turn it in to your editors without telling them.

If intentional theft is at the heart of plagiarism, then Dowd didn’t plagiarize Marshall. But she did plagiarize her friend, even if she did it with that friend’s acquiescence. And though she may never have lifted someone’s published words before last week, it could well be that she frequently cobbles together e-mails from friends in the course of writing — assembling? — her column.

At Media Matters, Eric Boehlert calls on the Times to produce the e-mail. At Scripting News, Dave Winer offers a similar view. My own take at this point is that Dowd not only owes us a fuller explanation, but she also owes her readers an apology. A brief suspension wouldn’t be out of order, either. It’s not a matter of wrecking her career; it’s a matter of basic accountability.

By far the most logical explanation would be that Dowd copied and pasted the Marshall passage herself with the intention of crediting him, and then forgot to do so. We could all understand that. Because she has given us something so much less straightforward, and because we still don’t know everything, I wonder if something else is going on.

At the Nytpicker, Amy Alkon asks something I’ve been wondering myself. Is it possible that an assistant did most of the work, including grabbing the Marshall quote without attribution, and that Dowd is now covering for both the assistant and herself? Normally I don’t like engaging in such speculation. But given the lack of transparency on the part of Dowd and her editors, I see no reason why we can’t offer some educated guesses.

Unfortunately, Dowd had the day off today. She should be writing her next column for Wednesday’s paper. I’ll extend to her the same invitation she received from Slate’s Jack Shafer last week: She should use her column to tell us what happened, how it happened and what she’s learned from the experience.

The standards to which she is held ought to be at least as high as those expected of any college sophomore.

Photo of Maureen Dowd (cc) by Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Dylan’s first-rate second-rate album

I’ve listened to Bob Dylan’s latest CD, “Together Through Life,” a number of times now, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The assessment that rings truest to me is this: at the age of 67, Dylan has, for the first time in his long career, succeeded in making a terrific second-rate album.

What I mean is that nearly every album Dylan’s ever made has been a masterpiece or close to it; an attempted masterpiece that falls short in some important way; or an utter embarrassment. The stakes are always high, and usually too high. On “Together Through Life,” by contrast, it sounds like he went into the studio to have fun and managed to convey that sense of fun to us listeners. Not that it’s going to be everyone’s idea of a good time — some of the lyrics are pretty dark. What matters is that nothing here is weighed down by any deep sense of portentous meaningfulness.

Dylan accomplished that mainly by collaborating with Grateful Dead lyricist Rob Hunter on all but one song. There’s nothing like offloading the lyrical load to remove the weight of critics’ poring over Dylan’s words to try to figure out what he’s trying to say. (Not to mention tracking down his sources for evidence of what might be called over-enthusiastic borrowing.)

Everyone’s been obsessing over the Bruce Davidson cover shot. I’ve chosen instead to include the back cover, by Josef Koudelka, because it looks exactly like “Together Through Life” sounds — like a rough Tex-Mex band whose lead instrument, incongruously enough, is an accordian. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an old-fashioned blues with an accordian as prominent as it is on “My Wife’s Home Town,” a creepy, ancient-sounding song that — despite the Willie Dixon credit — could be a lost Howlin’ Wolf track.

Straight-ahead, uptempo songs like “If You Ever Go to Houston,” “Jolene” and “Shake Shake Mama” give Dylan some good new live material. The slow ones? Well, let’s just say there’s no “Nettie Moore” or “Red River Shore” here. The slow songs, especially the Hunter-less “This Dream of You,” mainly serve as mood music.

And can we please stop obsessing over Dylan’s voice? Yes, it’s shot, and it has been for quite some time. But vocal qualities aside, the man is one of the great singers in the history of rock and roll, with unmatched phrasing and urgency. His singing is one of the main pleasures of listening to his new album.

I don’t know how much I’ll be listening to “Together Through Life” six months from now. The album doesn’t rank with his comeback trilogy of the past decade (“Time Out of Mind,” “Love and Theft” and “Modern Times”), but it’s not intended to.

It’s got a beat and you can dance to it. I’d give it three and a half stars out of five.

A crowdsourced documentary

No one spoke the word “crowdsourcing.” But that was the theme of a presentation Thursday evening by “Frontline” producer Rachel Dretzin, whose next documentary, “Digital Nation,” will be a collaborative effort between her team and visitors to the “Digital Nation” Web site. “Digital Nation” is an attempt to explain how our dependence on — and obsession with — the Internet is changing our culture for better and for worse.

Dretzin is putting all of her footage and interviews online. There’s a blog tracking progress of the documentary. A series of interactive chats is under way. And folks are encouraged to submit their own video and audio commentaries about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of online existence. There’s even a recommended “Digital Nation” hashtag (#dig_nat) for Twitter users.

“There is absolutely no way to be an expert. This is all of our story,” said Dretzin in an appearance at WGBH-TV (Channel 2), where “Frontline” is based. (Disclosure: I am a paid contributor to another WGBH program, “Beat the Press.”)

The idea, she added, is that rather than making the film in isolation and then getting reaction from the audience, the reaction would come first, followed by the documentary, which will come out sometime in 2010. “It’s an experiment for all of us,” she said.

Dretzin’s last “Frontline” film was 2008’s “Growing Up Online.” As was the case with that film, the author Douglas Rushkoff will be the on-camera correspondent in “Digital Nation.”

Collaborative journalism that combines the efforts of professionals and amateurs — sometimes called “crowdsourcing” — is one of the more promising developments to arise from Internet-based news ventures. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a leading new-media thinker, refers to such amateurs as “the people formerly known as the audience.”

The challenge for Dretzin is to integrate what the former audience has to say into her film, rather than merely featuring it as an online adjunct.

David Brooks almost gets it right

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is smart and useful in its treatment of the similarities between the national-security policies of President Obama and those of George W. Bush after 2003 (though I think a more reasonable date to pick would be 2005), and of the differences between the Bush team and Dick Cheney during the waning years of the Bush White House.

But Brooks misses entirely why Obama has been more successful in selling those policies. It’s not just that Obama is more skillful at it, and understands public leadership better than Bush ever did. More than anything, it’s that when Bush finally moved away from the abject failures of the Bush-Cheney years, they were his failures.

Bush may have begun doing the right thing — or, at least, he may have begun doing the wrong thing less often — but he no longer had any credibility. Thus, by the time Condoleezza Rice had begun moving foreign policy in a less-insane direction, Bush had already irretrievably cast himself as a malleable tool.

Nor are the choices Obama is making today — on Guantánamo, on torture photos, on military tribunals — the sorts of things that will gain any real support on their own merits. Rather, most reasonable people see them as the least-bad decisions he could make given the “mess” that he inherited from Bush, as he put it yesterday.

Again, not an argument Bush could have made.

Collins and Brooks on Obama

Not only do I like this exchange between New York Times columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks, but I like it more than many of their columns. It’s not blogging. It is a conversation — or “The Conversation,” as the Times labels it.

It’s not that they’re finally saying what they really mean — in fact, they’ve both made essentially the same points in their columns, especially Brooks. It’s that their exchange is loose and human in ways that their published work isn’t.

I hope “The Conversation” affects their column-writing.

Building an online news business

Steve Outing has a smart piece in Editor & Publisher on why newspapers can’t charge for access to their Web sites. His arguments are familiar, but he’s pulled them together nicely. Three points he makes are especially worth thinking about:

1. Newspapers that attempt to charge for Web access are opening themselves up to local competition. Outing specifically mentions local television stations. But most large cities have an even more logical candidate: a news-oriented public radio station, such as Boston’s WBUR (90.9 FM).

2. Information does not want to be free. News Web sites may have lost the paid-content war, but there’s no reason news organizations can’t charge for other forms of digital delivery, such as cellphone applications, Kindle and the like.

3. It’s the community, not the content, that has real monetary value. Outing says he’s particularly interested to see what New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has in mind, as Keller is talking about various benefits that would accrue to those with NYTimes.com memberships.

Maureen Dowd odds and ends

As the Maureen Dowd plagiarism story continues to wind down, a few stray pieces:

  • Despite Jack Shafer’s splendid suggestion that Dowd offer a full accounting of what happened in today’s column, she instead weighs in with an insipid imaginary conversation between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Gah.
  • Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, whose words were appropriated without credit by Dowd in her Sunday column, says he “never thought it was intentional,” and “that’s pretty much the end of it.”
  • The New York Post has picked up my Guardian column on the matter. Sure, I’m getting a kick out of it. But I’m also less than thrilled to be drafted by Rupert Murdoch into his ongoing pissing match with the Sulzbergers.

Business as usual on Beacon Hill

Sharp commentary today from Jon Keller and the Outraged Liberal on the near-certain prospect that the Legislature will raise the sales tax by 25 percent.

As I’ve said before, we probably need a significant tax hike. Since the late 1980s, there’s been a disconnect between our demand for spending (mainly in the form of local aid) and our willingness to pay for it.

But to move ahead on a major boost in the sales tax (from 5 percent to 6.25 percent) without making some real changes in the government pension system, and without insisting that public employees make the same kind of sacrifices in salary and health benefits that private-sector workers are making, is unconscionable.

It’s also business as usual.

House Speaker Robert DeLeo, in a recent op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, argued that the Legislature is on the way to reforming the way it does business. I hope that’s the case.

On the other hand, we all know that when the pressure is off, people tend to slide back into their old habits.

This is a great opportunity for Gov. Deval Patrick. Let’s hope he can rise to the occasion.

Is Dan Totten a hero or a hack?

Jason Schwartz has a good profile of Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten, posted at Boston Magazine’s Web site. Totten and his members are the last remaining obstacle to the New York Times Co.’s plan to extract $20 million in union concessions at the Boston Globe. Key excerpt:

Should his members vote to send him back into the ring with management, he could very well emerge as the hard-spined hero who had the gall to stare down the Gray Lady. Of course, if he fails, he’ll be branded the foolhardy union hack who hastened the end of the Boston Globe as we know it.

Schwartz’s story is loaded with nice details, nearly all of them from anonymous sources. Funny, but just the other day I was having an e-mail debate with a reader objecting to what Slate’s Jack Shafer likes to call “anonymice.”

The Totten profile is evidence that though anonymity may be less than ideal, it’s absolutely necessary when reporting on Boston’s paranoid media scene. I know whereof I write.