UPDATE: Maureen Dowd in Hot Water, Did Not ‘Attribute” — ‘NYT’ Corrects
By Greg Mitchell
Published: May 17, 2009 7:55 PM ET
NEW YORK It was a wild Sunday for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. It opened with her latest column in the newspaper, which closed by declaring that she had once opposed a wide-ranging probe of the uses of torture, and who authorized and knew about it, during the Bush administration but now favored it. This brought some praise from liberal news sites and bloggers often critical of Dowd.
But by mid-afternoon she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of “plagiarism” ensued.
“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 Iraq.”
The only words changed from Marshall paragraph: “we were” to “the Bush crowd was.”