Michael Calderone has the latest scoop on MoDoGate. The Times emailed him to say that it was no biggie since MoDo eventually gave credit and Marshall didn’t care very much (t takes them two paragraphs to say this, for some reason). Calderone writes:
I think this incident sheds light on the use of content without attribution — even if from a friend — that seems to be acceptable at the Times. Of course a columnist will take ideas from those they speak with, but entire passages verbatim?
If I was e-mailed a 40-plus-word block of text for this blog, and I used it, I’d include some sort of attribution — whether “a reader writes in,” “media insider points out” or whatever the case may be.
But from The Times’ response, it seems the paper finds it acceptable for columnists to take entire paragraphs from friends (or sources?), over the phone or e-mail, and reproduce them verbatim in the paper under the columnist’s byline.
I think that nails it. Inserting 40 word block that a friend wrote is bad form in blogging, why is it okay for the most prestigious newspaper in the country?
Instaputz has a good take on this too.
(I plagiarized this title, but I’m giving credit, so it’s okay.)
JGabriel
To preempt or, more likely, pre-quote, Atrios: It’s obviously time for another blogger ethics panel.
.
JasonF
The natural corollary to IOKIYAR is, of course, IOKIYAV.
geg6
This story has so much schadenfreude that I’m finding it totally irresistible. I mean, after the whole Joe Biden thing and all. And the self-righteousness of her crusade against Bill Clinton’s penis. This is like catnip to me. I’ve been cackling with glee since I saw the first inklings of this last evening.
Is that terrible of me?
asiangrrlMN
What this says to me is that MoDo has run out of things to say. She needs to go. It’s amazing how her writing has plummeted in the last year or so.
gex
So it is okay for MoDo to plagiarize while it is simultaneously okay for her to go after others for plagiarism.
Mmm… Smells so….Republican.
MattF
What’s problematical about this for me is the outlandishly dishonest explanation that Dowd gave originally. I mean– “I was abducted by aliens who submitted the column without my knowledge” would have been more plausible.
Keith
Does this mean she’s possibly not responsible for all those years of Dennis Miller-esque riffs and puns integrating pop culture with the Beltway cocktail circuit? Maybe this will improve my opinion of her. Not…bloody…likely.
EDIT: BTW, does anyone know if the question has been asked as to whether or not the “friend” of MoDo was actually JMM himself sending her his blog post? I’m wondering why he hasn’t said a peep about it, and part of me suspects he doesn’t want to get a “friend” in trouble over her laziness.
El Cid
Isn’t it pretty much the same thing when Judith Miller simply repeats Cheney et al’s words as if she had written them?
JenJen
MoDo’s story blows. We’re talking verbatim, (almost) word-for-word lifting, here. What are the odds that your “friend” would have remembered, to the word, what she/he “heard”? And whoever did lift it, they must not be very savvy if they thought Josh Marshall is just some obscure blogger, you know, nobody will ever recognize the passage…
I can’t believe she didn’t immediately blame it on her assistant.
ETA: @Keith: Oooooh. Interesting! But, it doesn’t make much sense, then, that the story was cross-posted at TPM. And weird that the blogger hadn’t posted anything since 2008 over there.
Napoleon
Heard? Hell, the commas were in the same place. I think it is being generous to believe a friend of hers told her that. At best a friend e-mailed the quote.
Michael D.
@asiangrrlMN:
Just the last year? How long have you been reading her? My guess is a year. ;-)
MikeJ
MoDo is too big to fail. Having a Pulitzer means she’ll always be the prom queen of Sulzberger High, no matter how many tests she cheats on.
harlana pepper
A friend of mine thinks she’s hot. He has a thing for red-haired Catholics or something like that. But then he also reads David Brooks, so . . .
DougJ
There is something attractive about her. But doesn’t change the fact that her columns are awful.
Napoleon
@harlana pepper:
He probably just likes to imagine her in those catholic school girl skirts and saddle shoes.
More seriously, she is an attractive woman, which doesn’t change the fact she is a seriously bad columnist.
Zach
What’s great about this is that Josh Marshall’s smart enough to not say a thing and let it die… seems clear given the Times quote in this story (“There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error.”) that the Times and TPM have come to something of an understanding to minimize embarrassment on the part of the Times. Question is what TPM gets out of the deal… at the very least it’s free publicity. Less savvy bloggers would (and have) handled this less successfully.
asiangrrlMN
@Michael D.: Heh. I was actually going to put that in my comment, that I’ve only read her for a year or so, and not on a steady basis for the last six months.
My guess would be the friend e-mailed her the paragraph, and she just lifted it. Lazy as well as dishonest.
BombIranForChrist
Dowd’s explanation that she simply re-wrote what she heard from a friend is so, so, so much bullshit. Is she serious? This would basically require both Dowd AND her friend to have photographic memories with no information getting lost in the transition from TPM to friend to Dowd to paper.
Dowd just stole it. If the NY Times ever does go out of business, it will be great for her to disappear. Maybe she can go to CNN and giggle with the morning anchors.
Incertus
What’s the over/under on the time it’ll take MoDo to write a piece that’s overloaded with “a reader wrote in” and “a friend emailed me” statements as a way of trying to downplay what she did here? Two weeks? Three?
The snarkier part of me thinks that the Times’ reaction to this is a case of “Dowd lifted from a blog, but that’s not real writing anyway, and so Marshall ought to be grateful for the publicity.”
Tonybrown74
Maybe if you just saw her walking down the street and she didn’t open her mouth …
And maybe its the fact that I’m a gay man, so I don’t really a have a frame of reference, but her whole madonna-whore wanna-be sex kitten shtick is extremely off-putting.
JL
Maureen got in a little bit of hot water a few years ago. She wrote an article stating that she was at a meeting in the Middle East when in fact she was on her way back home. Although at the time she did not credit anyone else, she wrote a follow-up crediting the person who was her stand in at the meeting. Does anyone else remember this?
Dave C
I think the appropriate punishment here is for the NY Times to halve MoDo’s salary and use that half to pay JMM to ghost-write all of MoDo’s columns. Better yet, they could just fire her and hire him!
JL
BombIranForChrist, Just out of curiosity, did you work for Rumsfeld?
Martin
MoDo writes an opinion column. Presumably, it’s her opinion, otherwise why not just publish random twitters to fill column inches?
That’s the problem. It’s not that she lifted it from Josh (which I can’t imagine she did), it’s that she lifted it from random person (which is plagiarism all the same). Can I get paid MoDos salary to publish selected excerpts of my inbox in the NYT?
MikeJ
@JL: No, but I remember she filed “dateline Derry, NH” when she was in Israel at the time.
wasabi gasp
Howzabout they replace MoDo with JoCo.
Martin
Oh, and I’d like to praise the boss.
This blog is currently being linked to on the front page by Kos and Sully and it’s still working. Considering that a year ago linking to it from This Week in Cheese would have blown the site up, I think some kudos are in order.
geg6
@Dave C:
This. Please.
Napoleon
@MikeJ:
I think that is what he is refering to. I recall that. It happened around 12/07
Zifnab
@Incertus:
In other news, blogs aren’t real news sources. Viva La Dead Tree!
@Martin:
O, HAI! IC U FOND MAH NOOWEST FEACHER
The Other Steve
Having now been at a few public events which received significant news coverage this is not uncommon.
Apparently what happens is about an hour or so before the event, the person speaking hands a copy of their speech to the reporters. They all write up the even based upon that copy and then hit send while the person is giving their speech.
If something happens in the actual event that differs from the planned remarks, they file a correction.
The reporters don’t actually listen to what is going on. This is the new Woodward/Bernstein school of journalism where you sit at your desk and wait for the phone to ring and tell you the news.
The Other Steve
Kudos to Mayor McCheese for snapping them gerbils into shape!
omen
@JenJen:
What are the odds that your “friend” would have remembered, to the word, what she/he “heard”?
makes sense if you factor in her “friend” is really one of her multiple personalities.
Tonal Crow
Mostly OT: Check out the comments on Judge Posner’s critique of modern conservatives’ badly-substandard intellectual foundation. As one commenter noted:
JL
@MikeJ: Ah, the memory.. I think that you are right. Thanks
Ash Can
OT but on the subject or Twitter, Newt Gingrich is throwing a hissy fit, threatening Twitter with legal action and everything, because someone on Twitter is being ZOMGMEEEN to him. LOLZ! (h/t GOS)
JK
Maureen Dowd is one of the two valley girls of the punditocracy (the other one being Ana Marie Cox). She’s a pathetic joke of a columnist and should have been fired from the Times years ago.
The success enjoyed by Dowd and Cox and the fact that they are currently employed at all shows how low the standards of journalism have fallen.
Their closest male counterparts in terms of sheer cluelessness are Mark Halperin, Marc Ambinder, Mike Allen, Howard Kurtz, and Dana Milbank.
JasonF
@Incertus:
Is that really snarky? I thought the contempt for “mere blogging” positively dripped off the Times’s response.
JasonF
@JL:
I do remember this, but it was actually the other way around. She datelined a column “New Hampshire” while she was actually in Israel. Details here.
AhabTRuler
@Ash Can: Best part of the article:
Oh, and I got it from a friend.
Indylib
OT Medical marijuana gets a win from the Supreme Court.
Laura W
@Martin:
That’s so funny, and so damn true.
A year ago I was an avid Sully reader and on May 23, 2008, he wrote:
Hillary-Induced Madness
John Cole is at his breaking point:
I kid not…I couldn’t log on over here for 3 days. I thought the site either no longer existed or had exploded. Obviously, the latter. I was so intrigued by Sully’s post and John’s rant, however, since I was suffering from my own sanity-threatening case of Hillary-induced madness — I persisted. Now I hardly ever leave, and I haven’t read Sully for months.
Keith G
MoDo should remember…..It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up.
JK
Poetic Justice for Maureen Dowd because she had such a grand old time attacking Joe Biden for his plagarism.
Dennis-SGMM
The non-explanation explanation from Dowd dovetails neatly with George Will’s unretracted bullshit column on climate change. Their egos are too big to fail.
gex
@wasabi gasp: Seconded!
Joshua Norton
Monkeys and typewriters, monkeys and typewriters.
yam
So, lemme get this right…
If a blogger or Google makes a link to a newspaper, they should pay the paper, yes? But if a columnist for a paper steals ideas from a blogger, it’s no big deal cuz, like, they’re just a dirty, lazy blogger?
If the death of newspapers stops this nonsense, I can live without MoDo.
JenJen
O/T, but it is worth interrupting this thread to point all to this video of Jesse Ventura on The View this morning. Bonus Elisabeth Hasselbeck pwn3age!!
Let’s be honest, Jesse Ventura is making more sense when speaking out against torture than just about anyone right now.
Joshua Norton
Why can’t she just make up sources like the respectable folks at The Important National Review? Plagiarizing real people…what a noob move.
kay
I don’t think it matters that much.
Her last big scoop was when we found out that David Brooks is insanely jealous of Michelle Obama’s toned arms.
I really could have lived happily forever without ever knowing what these two horrible, useless people discuss when they share a cab.
gbear
@JenJen: If Jesse can avoid tripping himself on his own ego, he’s got a lot to say that makes sense. He knows a lot about the real world and isn’t afraid to spill the beans. Unfortunately, about 10 minutes is his limit before he turns boorish. He was really good on Larry King last week, especially the comment about Cheney, one hour, a waterboard and Sharron Tate.
JenJen
@gbear: I agree, but give him 9 minutes and a microphone and I’ll bet he can change a few minds, I really do. I especially enjoyed the part of the video where he calls Cheney on his “enhanced interrogation” bullshit.
Also, there was a comment on the YouTube clip I found intriguing… “Calling torture ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ is like calling rape ‘non-compliant sexual gratification.'” Crude and made me wince, but effective.
MTiffany
You know what I love most about Maureen Dowd? She’s just so damned smart and perceptive. So damned smart and perceptive that when “her friend” relayed to her Josh Marhsall’s words, she even heard the commas. Now that is a world class
plagiarizing bobbleheadintellect. She heard the commas! Incredible. Truly.MikeJ
To be fair, it’s not like punctuation is completely arbitrary. Commas fall at certain places in a sentence, not because they look good, but because of rules for their placement. Dependent clauses, interjections, and lists, either Oxford style or not, call for commas.
Nobody has yet faulted her for knowing there should be a period at the end of the sentence. Why get hung up on commas?
RSA
I think it’s odd to hear this described as “alleged plagiarism”; it’s plagiarism, pure and simple, which doesn’t rest on the intentions of the plagiarist. Now, it could have been accidental, in some high-school-essay-writing sense, but who cares, really? It’s not something a professional columnist should let slip by in such a short work.
By the way, from now on I plan to source everything properly: “Such and such is true [the Internet, 2009].”
JK
@JenJen:
Ted Koppel made this statement on the BBC about a week ago during a discussion about US torture policy.
harlana pepper
@DougJ: I’m sure he thinks they are great, like I said, he reads David Brooks and, I’m sure, also Broder. Otherwise, he’s a very nice fellow.
JL
@JasonF: Mike J. mentioned this also. The link is funny though since it goes to Josh’s site.
Margarita
Sorry, I haven’t been following this, but who is the “friend,” and do they corroborate Dowd’s story? These would seem like obvious questions. If Dowd has refused to say, I would certainly wonder why.
HyperIon
@MikeJ:
If only it were so.
The rules are rarely obeyed, particularly on the ‘tubes.
I think many people DO add commas because they look good.
The idea that a comma is supposed to increase readability of a sentence is foreign to many. Recently T-N C has been driving me crazy with his personal comma style. Example:
Why would one EVER put a comma in that sentence?
Beauzeaux
Those smug elitists over at This Week in Cheese never link to anybody.