When school children plagiarize, we let them know they shouldn’t do it and tell ourselves: “They’re young; they’ll learn.”
But what are we to do when
Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen posts - - -
As you may have heard by now, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd ran into a little trouble over the weekend. A TPM Cafe blogger noticed a phrase in the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist's latest piece that sounded pretty familiar.
Here's Dowd, yesterday:
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
And here's TPM's Josh Marshall, in a post 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
Where Josh wrote "we were," Dowd wrote "the Bush crowd was." The other 41 words, including every comma, are exactly the same.
I'd assumed that Dowd would chalk this up to a careless error, perhaps pin it on a research assistant, explain that she meant to credit TPM, and express contrition over the mix-up.
But that's not quite what transpired.
Dowd told the Huffington Post that the quote was obviously from TPM, but said she doesn't read the blog. "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," Dowd said. "But, clearly, my friend must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me."
That's not much of a response. The friend told Dowd an exact-word quote, including the commas, and she "weaved" it into her column? (It seems more likely to me the friend emailed Dowd the paragraph, Dowd liked it, and pasted the paragraph into her column.)
Dowd's explanation is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive. In fact, Jamison Foser asks the right question: "So how do you think Maureen Dowd would react if, say, Joe Biden ripped off a few dozen of someone else's words, then offered up an excuse this lame? Or if Al Gore did?"
Benen’s entire excellent post’s here. Some great comments follow it.
Here’s one from The Answer Is Green - - -
This reminds me of the time I had to flunk a kid because he handed in a Rudyard Kipling poem as his own and his defense was, "Oh, my friend gave that to me; I thought HE wrote it!"
It did not seem to occur to him - as it does not seem to occur to Dowd - that plagiarizing your friend's words is EXACTLY as bad as plagiarizing the published words of someone famous.
And this from Kevin Hayden - - --
What a stain on Josh's reputation as a journalist, to be copied by a talentless hack.
My opinion - - -
For the sake of what remains of its once "gold standard" reputation and out of respect for its readers, the Times should suspend Dowd. But it probably won’t
Hat tip: cks
2 comments:
Long ago, as a graduate teaching assistant, I had to grade a term paper written by a student. As I began reading, I kept thinking, this sure sounds familiar. It bothered me that this student, whose essays generally were notable for their misspelled words and "unique " use of English grammar, had written a masterpiece of English prose (this was long before the days of computer spell and grammar check). It took a while but I found that he had copied, verbatim, the first four pages of a book on the Irish problem by Kees. When I confronted him with the book and his paper, he claimed that it was not his fault and that he did not deserve the 0. His excuse, his girlfriend had written the paper for him so if anyone should be in trouble it was she!. Dowd's excuse isn't even novel!
cks
When (not if) Joe Biden steals someone else's words, or if Al Gore were to plagiarize, you may rest assured that Dowd, the NYT, and the rest of the leftwing nut fringe would not utter one word of criticism. If, on the other hand, a Republican or anyone not anointed by the high priests of political correctness were to do so, you can bet your life savings the great leftwing outrage machine would rumble to life and we'd hear of nothing else for days, maybe weeks or months. I think Jamison Foser used a very poor example.
I make it a point never to read anything Dowd writes because she's a poor writer and her leftward tilt is always so extreme she leaves no room for discourse. In so doing, I don't have to subject myself to her rants.
Tarheel Hawkeye
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