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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd dodged a bullet this week.
With the announcement that her use of text from a Josh Marshall blog post without attribution was simply "an error," a spokeswoman from the New York Times declared an end to the controversy that had engulfed the Pulitzer winning writer since Sunday. Dowd also got a pass from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who said the quote-lifting was "probably an inadvertant mistake."
Why were they so willing to excuse Dowd?
According to the email published by Politico's Michael Calderone, New York Times' spokeswoman Diane McNulty said Dowd's effort to correct the error, and the fact that Marshall hadn't called for any further action meant that "There is no need to do anything further..." Kurtz said that if Dowd had meant to steal from someone, she would have been slicker about it. Besides, he said,
"what Dowd did, while clearly an embarrassment, hardly falls into the same category as the serial fabrications of Jayson Blair that I exposed six years ago."
Jayson Blair, it will be remembered, is the former NYT reporter who in 2003, was found not only to have plagiarized repeatedly, he made up stories out of whole cloth. The discovery of his fabrications led to the departure of former editor in chief Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd, sparked an internal inquiry that led to an overhaul of management practices, and set off a national debate over ethics and affirmative action. (A 2006 New York magazine investigation concluded that Boyd, who died that November, had been scapegoated.)
Back in 2004, Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, shared lessons learned from 20 years of ferreting out cases of plagiarism. One of those conclusions was that "Not all cases of plagiarism are equal." He continued: "With guidance, supervisors can exercise discretion and match punishments to the severity of the crime."
Taking Dowd's explanation that a friend told her Marshall's words without telling her who had written them on its face, Poynter ethics expert Kelly McBride called Dowd's actions "understandable," but "inexcusable," adding:
"when Dowd lifted what she thought were her friend's words, she was actually re-stealing something. But because this is Dowd, the high liberal priestess of biting political criticism, the woman who excoriated Joe Biden for plagiarism, her crime is further stained by an air of hypocrisy."
Of course, questions continue to be raised about the truthfulness of Dowd's explanation. Kenneth Thomas, another blogger at Josh Marshall's site, Talking Points Memo, found that both Dowd's column and the pilfered Marshall post use the phrase "Old fashiond POW." Thomas contends that that Dowd's explanation was already "implausible," but this with this new parallel, "its plausibility disappears to the vanishing point."
More on past plagiarism scandals in journalism:
- In 2007, acclaimed writer and journalism professor James Merrill lost his column when it was discovered that he had lifted text from student newspaper articles.
- Freedom Forum has a compendium of plagiarisms, fabrications, and other acts of journalistic fraud over the last 30 years.
- Plagiarism is apparently a pervasive problem in journalism about videogames.
- Cases such as Dowd's are a teachable moment for journalism educators. Here's a good guide for students about what plagiarism is and why it and other fabrications are unacceptable.
