More reflections on Maureen Dowd's plagiarism
For background and other links, see yesterday's entry, "Borrowed wisdom can be OK. Borrowed words...never."
Maureen Dowd's Next Step--Having confessed to lifting copy, the New York Times' columnist almost sets things right. By Jack Shafer (Slate)
Maureen Dowd's lazy New York Times column. By Dan Kennedy (Guardian)
This Just In: Maureen Dowd Can Do Whatever...She Wants. By Mike Riggs (Washington City Paper)
Maureen Dowd’s ‘plagiarism’: should the court consider the value of the pilfered goods? By Jeff McMahon (Scorched Earth)
It’s not like she made off with a pot of gold, more like a bucket of mud. Shouldn’t the court consider the value of the pilfered goods? It’s the standard nowadays to credit authors when borrowing even a single sentence, but now that she’s admitted the words came from from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, people ought to let it go.
Which E-mail Pal Helped Dowd Plagiarize? By Jeff Bercovici (Daily Intel)
Dowd has so far declined to identify the friend in question (or, for that matter, to comment on how often she presents the sentences of others as though she had written them)...Which means it's guessin' time! There's no shortage of names to speculate on, thanks to Dowd's unusually active social life and rich dating history.
No Dowd about it: Maureen deserves a pass. By Lou Carlozo (True/Slant)
So Maureen Dowd lifted a sentence or so into her work. Big. Freaking. Deadline. Deal. If you extrapolate this over the course of her career–and the hundreds of thousands of lines she’s regaled us with lo these many years–what does that boil down to? Something like a 99.999 percent clean record in the journalistic ethics department?...speaking as a guy who’s logged his share of claris, goofs, mixed-up facts -- and maybe, just maybe, a borrowed line or two -- I say give the talented Ms. Dowd a break. If she hasn’t earned it with all the great commentary and reporting she’s done over the years, then who, I ask, has earned it?
Missing the forest. By Whet Moser (Chicago Reader)
Obvious rules about plagiarism aside, this is sort of a problem. And, yes, I know she won a Pulitzer. Jethro Tull won a Grammy, and I don't like rock flute any more for that.