By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
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.
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.
Noam Cohen profiles Josh Marshall in the New York Times following Marshall’s winning a Polk Award for his coverage of the U.S. attorneys scandal. Cohen kindly quotes me at some length.
As I noted last week in a blog post for my students, Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and related sites have pioneered a new kind of investigative reporting that combines the journalistic expertise of Marshall and his crew with the decentralized knowledge of their readers.
As citizen-journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor has memorably put it, “my readers know more than I do.” Marshall has figured out how to tap into that knowledge and make sense of it.