Dowd’s Dunderheaded Move

When we were in elementary school, public school teachers beat a simple lesson into their charges’ heads: Plagiarism is lying. We were taught a simple rule – if you use more than three words, in order, of another person’s work, you need to attribute it.

This was in fourth- or fifth-grade English class, when our teachers feared we would lift paragraphs of information from dusty reference books unless adequately scared and informed of the rules. We were taught to write real footnotes – remember them? – from documented sources, looked up in real books.

It was many years later that we learned about terms like journalistic integrity, second-hand sources, and later, the Internet.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is failing the lesson, after admitting to “inadvertently using a blogger’s words as her own.” That’s how politely The Associated Press put it on Monday. The story dances around what our elementary school teachers, college professors and working journalists would call lying.

The story says Dowd “acknowledged the error;” that she corrected her Sunday column online “to give proper credit for the material” and that The New York Times issued a formal correction on Monday saying Dowd “failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse” to a blog by Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

In plain talk, a paragraph in Dowd’s Sunday column on the run-up to the Iraq war is virtually identical to one written by Marshall. Judge for yourself. Here’s what appeared in Dowd’s original column:

“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.”

Last week Marshall wrote virtually the same sentence in his blog. The only difference? Where Dowd’s column used the phrase “the Bush crowd was,” Marshall used “we were.”

So how did it happen? Dowd claims she did not read Marshall’s post, but had heard the information from a friend who didn’t mention reading it on Marshall’s blog. Was this friend Harold Glass, Jan Brady’s fictional boyfriend? And did this friend have total recall of Marshall’s blog?

Dowd’s explanation is unbelievable. The paragraph is 41 words verbatim from Marshall. The only believable explanation is that she cut the words out of his blog and pasted them into her column. How else could someone come up with the same words, on the same topic, in the same order?

Still to be seen is if Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, will face any real punishment for the “mistake” that she called unintentional. The real victim here is journalism, already wounded by layoffs and buyouts and shrinking circulation.

Now, apparently, Pulitzer Prize winners are stealing from the Internet, fudging when they get caught and skirting any real punishment. It took The New York Times four years to fire plagiarist and serial liar Jayson Blair, who resigned before he could get fired. Dowd shouldn’t get that option.