Ruh Roh! MoDo Caught Plagiarizing From TPM
By Nicole Belle Sunday May 17, 2009 5:00pm
Men may not be necessary to Maureen Dowd, but a professional ethicist appears to be.
TPM:
Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times:
"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 Iraq."
"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."
Almost verbatim. Look, we bloggers take shortcuts and copy and paste others all the time. I do it because there are a whole host of people out there who write better than I. But we GIVE CREDIT when we do it, as I did above when acknowledging that this post came from TPM. For a Pulitzer Prize winner to lift work done by bloggers and pass it off as her own on the pages of the NY Times is just not cool.
UPDATE: MoDo admits to HuffPo that she lifted the words and will give Josh Marshall proper credit...but I'm puzzled by her alibi:
josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
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.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.
Now am I mistaken, or did MoDo just excuse her plagiarism by saying that she actually was trying to plagiarize her friend?
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I did that in Jr. High once.
-ep
The plagiarisms of Modo have kept us safe since 9/11, so how about you just back the hell off.
Dumber than Nancy Pelosi
It was the CIA's fault
Her "friend" did not recite the words verbatim. Dowd has been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Phooey on her explanation.
It was an obvious lifting of someone else's words. Of all journalists, she should have known someone would call her out on her shit.
She's just making it worse with her "story".
It would be better for her to just admit she read it and copied it because it was so succinct.
But, regardless of this "mistake", I will forgive her, because all her past columns have been excellent.
I forgive you Maureen.
Now, fess up.
forgive her for being the Bush 1-loving, Dem-castrating tool that she's been. She's a big reason the Times is nicknamed "Pravda on the Hudson."
And her excuse for plagiarizing is BS, too. She just happened to quote her friend verbatim, who happened to quote JM verbatim? That's a shabby excuse.
Theft is theft; wrong is wrong, and plagiarization is not on, particularly when followed by such a lame-ass excuse.
Well, she was trying to just repeat what her friend "said", as they were "talking", as she says, because you know, people often talk in exact word for word sentences from some blog, and then Maureen just wanted to "weave" it in to her column by, uh, typing in word for word exactly what the friend said....
Sheeesh. I think the proverbial hole was just dug that was bigger than the first one.
Someone sent her an e-mail and she used it. Without attribution.
She meant to just plagarize a friend, but she slipped and plagarized TPM instead.
Pretty clear what happened, yep.
She made it much worse with that ridiculous excuse.
Her friend suggested she make that specific point. She erred. Noted. Give credit. Good work TPM. All back to hammering this most important issue.
Torture to generate the false justification for war.
Produced Intel Linking al-Qaeda to Iraq.
How's that for making the flowers out of fertilizer?
However, Ms. Dowd has been extremely critical of others who have plagiarized without attribution. Her explanation is inexplicable. Who, when talking to another person, remembers VERBATIM a very long and complex sentence, changing only a pronoun to a noun phrase? Which phrase itself is the VERBATIM copy of the original? That never happens in a three-phase transfer of oral information, unless the "talking" with a friend was either e-mailing or the friend reading the TPM column to Dowd. But these are not excuses for her behavior. Dowd, critical of everyone who has made a mistake, shows herself to have feet of clay.
She sounds a lot like Coulter
How stupid must one be to believe that she just took her words out of a verbal conversation she had with a friend? And yet, they were verbatim (except naming "the Bush crowd").
DC "journalists" really think they are smart, don't they? But they are actually dumber than we were, as someone before me said, in Jr. High.
i could be way off, but i can almost imagine that she thought she was being clever, making an improvement... "josh will thank me!"
they do in Easthampton and Greenwich.
"Now am I mistaken, or did MoDo just excuse her plagiarism by saying that she actually was trying to plagiarize her friend?"
I'm with akovia. That was straight up cut-and-paste. Anybody ever play "whispering down the lane?" Yea, an anecdote about a point made by another writer produced the same syntax. Uh huh.
maureen dowd is just another f#cking gop moron
without ethics. "plagiarize? what are you talking about?, she says.
the gop is mostly without morals or humility. if they get caught, the
they blames it on someone else and usually it's the victim"s fault.
a very big SCREW YOU to maureen dowdypuss !!!
This is sort of OT, but note that Josh used "we were," while MoDo's substituted "the Bush crowd was."
Who is accepting responsibility for the nation's actions, and who is blaming it on some "other?"
Forgive me if I am dubious. Even if a friend gave MO the general idea for the paragraph, unless her friend was dictating word for word from Josh's piece, there is no way that the sentence comes out spot on right down to every noun, verb, adverb, article, pronoun (with that one exception where "we were" got swapped out for "the Bush crowd was"). It's ridiculous.
Another black eye to the grey lady. How long before MoDo decides it's time to spend more time with her family?
written that paragraph. All this bullshit about torture and photos of humiliated inmates. It's swine flu lite.
Why do people want to fly airplanes into our buildings? What's the reason? Because they hate our freedoms as Bush said so famously?
It's because of the despicable Israeli policy toward the Palestinians paid for with our dollars. Tell me I'm wrong.
Best I can do is tell you you're a thread hijacking ass.
Stay bent out've shape about BS. You're a good little phoney "progressive." funny shit
And second of all, I take plagarism to be an incredibly serious issue, no matter what issue is being discussed when it's used, and no matter how influential the plagarizer (and their outlet) that uses it happens to be.
I'm with you that our society tends to get distracted by bright, shiny objects way too often... but I just don't agree that incredibly faulty ethics by one of most prominent Op-Ed writers, for THE most prominent newspaper in the world, is just something everybody should yawn at.
Conservatives do that shit, and they do it fucking WELL. We don't.
Why would the the most prominent liberal newspaper in the country write editorial after editorial pushing the Bush administration into attacking Iraq? All thru 2002 and up to the invasion in March of 2003 they advocated for it.
They knew it was a mistake yet they did it anyway. Why did they do that?
Because it's not a liberal newspaper unless by 'liberal' you mean controlled by govt and big business. And that's more like fascist, as in 'A Fascist Tool.'
We know the poorly informed feel that liberals are fascists, but that is a mistake made out of unmitigated ignorance.
"facts have a liberal bias" and you can quote me on that:):)
No. I won't quote you.
That is Colbert's quote, not yours.
(Not to nit-pick, but credit where credit is due!) ;-)
Give me a list of liberal newspapers that set the agenda for everyone else. I quote the Tuscaloosa Shopper all the time but who the f am I?
"the Mighty Wurlitzer" and the CIA. Yeah, that's how "liberal" the NYTimes is. The Bush family pulls the strings and the Sulzberger family dances.
And if you quote the Tuscaloosa Shopper all the time you might want to step up your conversational and intellectual game, champ.
Watch 'Manufacturing Consent.' I think that should set you straight on the alleged 'liberalness' of the much overrated NYT. "All the 'news' that's really shit"
yes, they've been a conservative newspaper; whether through their own choice or through cowardice, is unknown.
A million people could have written that graph, but Josh Marshall actually wrote it, and Dowd plagiarized it.
Torture is BS? It's swine flu lite? Only to wingnuts desperate to defend Bushco to the end. The US has executed war criminals for less than Cheney and Bush have done.
People fly airplanes into our buildings for many reasons, but mostly because it gives them an excuse to start a hugely profitable pair of wars in the Middle East while issuing fascistic laws here at home. It also gives them an excuse to torture. Hey, they won the trifecta!
Bushco didn't fly those planes into buildings to protest Israeli policy. Heck, recent Israeli policy has been in lockstep with Bushco's.
So like I said, you're completely, utterly wrong. But thanks for writing!
Answer the question, why did the NY Times push the war? Smart guy.
Maybe because the notion of "the liberal media" is still just a myth???
A third-grader would call BS on this "excuse".
At best you can get away with it if it's a three or four word phrase, or a multiple-word adjective.
But she's asking us to believe that what almost amounts to a paragraph, in word-for-word verbatim, happens to just be a 'coincidence'?
If she was trying to save her dignity (or her job) I think she just took about five steps backwards.
Would it have killed her to give Josh credit? If his stuff is good enough to read (and it is) - then it's good enough to source.
*
One would think after all the plagiarism scandals of the last few years at the Times, that they would have a zero tolerance policy on this. Regardless of whether I like Ms. Dowd or follow the same political beliefs as her, journalism has to be sacrosanct. If we on the left are going to pillage Faux News and others on non-existent, or at best, sloppy journalism, we have to be able to call out one of our own and she has to answer to the consequences of poor judgment. Sorry Maureen, this deserves a firing. I expected much better than this.
maureen dowd is the george harrison of her generation.
harrison didn't steal another's song.
and that's a cheap shot at my favorite beatle.
Google it. Dianna Ross may agree with skippy since she won the lawsuit.
by 'talking' Maureen means chatting and the friend just copy-pasted the blog into the chat box. As for plagiarizing her friend, when I help a friend with a sentence I don't expect a byline just as I don't expect them to pay me when they come over for dinner. It's a gift.
Of course, this still leaves Miss Dowd as a very lazy 'journalist' but that is no surprise.
Yes, plagiarism is bad. Worse, is information like this never making it into the mainstream press.
Certainly, she may have been lazy and should give credit, but it's not worth dragging her down for trying to do the right thing.
She could be fired for this. She was an Imus buddy so they might deep six her ass. f so called liberals
now you're just a jerk.
her denial about her lesbianism is obviously impacting negatively on her creative juices and professional ethics.
Lesbian juices?
rather than the rag she writes for.
many tho
we get all of the lickers here, Mike, they google that.
I really hope that you find your mother Mike.
Were you looking for some
onething to do?What a little turd.
ate her first draft
Who you crappin', MoDo. You even plagarized the commas.
I was the first to say that they tortured to get false confessions to justify their war. They stole it from my posts damnit.
how the corners of her mouth turn down, deeply down.
Um, who cares? MoDo is a ridiculous character. She purrs and uses her feminine wiles. Whatever, she knows her audience. Best, Mo.
Surely we can do better than this. What was the point of this attack? Nicole, are you jealous of Maureen Dowd? With all the major problems in the world, I would rank this as one of the least that I would concern myself over...
Are you kidding me?
This is the same woman who excoriated Joe Biden as a plagiarist for not properly citing Neal Kinnock just once in a speech (he gave the speech several times and did cite Kinnock in all the others) who gave the lamest alibi ever for lifting almost completely someone else's work?
The MOST important problem in the world? Of course not, and I think it would be interesting to see how you've divined that I am claiming it is.
However, she is a professional writer--and we writers know that plagiarizing is not acceptable. For someone who has such harsh standards for others, it's not asking too much for her to hold herself to the same.
Nicole, I was unaware of any past history between Maureen and Biden. As far as news goes, this is a yawner for me. There are so many other much more important issues to worry about and so many more dangerous and divisive villains to expose and prosecute, I just don't see how this rates as a top C&L story. It's something I would expect to read on a right-wing blog. IMO, it just isn't that important in the grand scheme of things...
Now if Maureen were to do a repeat on another Biden-like story in the future, I could see trotting this incident out to shame her back into her place, but I see no good reason at this moment to dig up the corpses. Let the past stay buried. I would much rather see the torturers behind bars...
I'm sorry that this sounded like a jealousy thing to me. I should have chosen my words a bit better and for that I apologize...
You're not a professional writer, are you?
Nicole Belle points out both points quite well. MoDo was more than happy to rake Biden over the coals for his supposed plagiarism, than comes up with what has to be one of the all-time worst excuses for her own theft.
And theft it is. Plagiarism is the theft of another writer's ideas and words.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen this EXACT same scenario played out in the fanfic playgrounds. It's just incredible - these people are supposed to be serious adults, yet they behave like Harry Potter fangirls.
Just watch. In her correction, she'll come up with some variant of it was just a social experiment LOL kthnxbi!
Fandom. Gotta love it. *shakes head*
You want to make me believe you never forgot to give credit when copy-pasting someones work?
This fake controversy has more to do with the blogger vs columnist food fight than anything else.
Every writer at some point or other has forgotten to give credit, or given inadequate credit. But when it's brought to your attention, you do your mea culpa, you grovel suitably, and throw yourself upon your sword.
You don't come up with some lame-ass excuse that basically says, "I didn't mean to steal it from the guy that published it, I thought I was just stealing it from my friend."
Name the friend....
..because I thought that her Sunday column was her best piece in a long time. Oh well..still some good thoughts and insights though.
That has to be the lamest, stupidest excuse since Nancy Pelosi.
Badda Bump Bump Bump
Another One Bites the Dust
Maureen, you ignorant slut...
Was Dan Ackroyd the father of the modern republican party?
... Jason Blair Cup for Innovations in Journalistic Ethics.
Nicole, you sound a little hysterical to me. A friend suggested wording for a column and that's plagiarism? Cmon, that's editorial assistance.
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