By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005
Jack Shafer points out in Slate that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd deserves credit for not going into hiding, not whining and not claiming that what she did wasn’t plagiarism. I’ll give her that.
In an e-mail to Media Nation, Shafer also fingered an attribution I’d messed up in my Guardian column, which has now been corrected. I’d misattributed a Dowd e-mail to the wrong source. Thank you, Jack.
It’s not plagiarism, assuming Sunday’s column was an isolated incident. Rather, it’s phoning in a lazy, solipsistic column that is sometimes entertaining but rarely digs deeper than the conventional wisdom of the day.
Northeastern journalism students touring the Middle East have broken some important news.
Kate Augusto, Danielle Capalbo and Nick Mendez report that Ayman Nour, a leading political dissident in Egypt, has decided to return to prison and finish his sentence in order to dramatize what he calls the Egyptian government’s ongoing lack of respect for democratic values.
The Boston Globe’s Worldly Boston blog has picked up on the news.
Nour was released earlier this year, with the government announcing that it was responding to Nour’s poor health.
Our students are traveling with journalism professor Carlene Hempel and political-science professor Denis Sullivan, who directs both the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development and the International Affairs Program.
Please check out the group blog, as well as the individual student and faculty blogs that are linked from the main page.
Photo of Nour by Nick Mendez.
David Warsh wrote a letter to the Boston Globe over the weekend responding to Michael Paulson, who, in turn, was responding to Warsh’s observation — which I think I’m characterizing correctly — that the Globe’s coverage of the pedophile-priest scandal was perhaps more popular with the Pulitzer judges than it was with readers.
Specifically, Warsh objects to being called “insane.”
One point Warsh makes that is undeniable is that the Globe’s relentless pursuit of younger readers has not paid off. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea. But by putting so much effort into trying to convert non-readers into readers, the Globe — and many other newspapers — may only have succeeded in the opposite.
My earlier item, with links to Warsh’s and Paulson’s previous salvos.
Civil-liberties lawyer and friend of Media Nation Harvey Silverglate explains in the Guardian why the Washington Post is wrong to claim that it can’t use the word “torture” because of libel concerns.
Simon Owens has the latest on the Maureen Dowd plagiarism story, with quotes from Dowd and a no-comment from Josh Marshall.
The New York Times has already updated Dowd’s column to credit Marshall, but there’s no acknowledgment that there was a problem in the first place.
OK, this is premature, but here is Dowd friend Howell Raines’ 1998 takedown of the Boston Globe, which he chastises for failing to fire star columnist Mike Barnicle after he’d been caught plagiarizing one-liners from a book by George Carlin.
I would imagine Times editors are going to have to do something even if Dowd’s explanation pans out. I’d also guess that the next 24 hours will be key. Right now, we can assume that dozens (hundreds?) of bloggers are scouring every column she’s ever written.
If she can survive that, then she’ll get through this. If not, then all bets are off.
And it looks like a mighty compelling case. Watch for her to say that she mixed up her notes. (Via Jay Rosen.)
Update: Dowd responds. And I was wrong. She’s claiming a friend fed her the line.
The Boston Globe today runs an “Editor’s Note” saying that Ariel Ayanna, whose family was the subject of a feel-good story about people trying to get by with less money, “never meant to suggest” that he isn’t looking for a job.
It will be interesting to see if this is the end of it.
Update: And, no, that wasn’t the end of it. The Ayannas have posted a blog item taking issue with both the Editor’s Note and with a letter to the editor that they submitted and then retracted because of proposed cuts that they say eliminated most of their criticism of the Globe.
“I guess I was pretty naive to think I could express myself accurately and without censorship,” writes Amiri Ayanna.
My offer for the Globe to respond here remains on the table.
Thanks to rozzie02131, who discovered that an e-version of the Boston Globe will become available next month. Called GlobeReader, it will presumably be based on the same Adobe Air platform as Times Reader 2.0, which was unveiled earlier this week.
No word on pricing. The come-on says that it will be available with “all Boston Globe home delivery subscriptions.” If that means Sunday-only print customers can get it for free, that would represent quite a savings.
But being able to buy a separate GlobeReader subscription for $10 or $15 a month, as you can with Times Reader, would be better.
Yesterday the New York Post ran a pretty emphatic item reporting that entertainment mogul David Geffen is not interested in buying the New York Times or a share thereof. The Post’s Peter Lauria called the Geffen bubble a “myth,” citing “three sources with direct knowledge of the situation.”
Today the Times itself comes back with a story claiming that Geffen is “seriously interested” in buying the Times, either in whole or in part. Reporters Richard Pérez-Peña and Michael Cieply one-up the Post, attributing their reporting to “people who are very familiar with his [Geffen’s] thinking.”
Far from being a throwaway, it’s likely that the word “very” was the subject of extensive negotiations between the Times and, uh, one of its sources. Very interesting, I’d say.