GOODY TWO SHOES: Maureen Dowd: Plagiarist?
Slate’s Jack Shafer weighs in on New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd plagiarizing “about 40 words” from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo
On the one hand he commends her for acknowledging the charge, and not denying or excusing it. On the other hand, he thinks her explanation of how it happened is “a tad incomplete”:
In correspondence with the Huffington Post and Politico after the lifted passage was pointed out, Dowd suggested she had been talking and e-mailing with a friend about the topic of her column, mistook Marshall's passage for her friend's work, and used it in her column. It's unclear whether Marshall's work ended up in Dowd's column because she took near-perfect notes of the conversation with the unnamed friend or because she cut and pasted from the friend's e-mail.
Shafer thinks Dowd needs to “tell her readers in detail how she came to commit this transgression.” The fact is, before Dowd became aware that she had plagiarized from Marshall, she knew she had lifted her as yet-unnamed friend’s words and ideas and passed them off as her own. If this friend isn’t well-known - unlike Marshall – who would have been the wiser, after all?
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