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Four steps to Understanding Media Irony

  1. Glenn Greenwald in Salon quotes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, and says that her column is “uncharacteristically cogent and substantive”. Hmmm.
  2. TPM points out that at least one paragraph from Dowd’s column was plagiarized from an earlier column by Josh Marshall in TPM. Does that explain why Greenwald thought it was such a good column?
  3. Dowd admits to using words from Marshall’s column (and updates her column to give proper credit), but claims that she had not read Marshall’s column but instead had heard it from a friend, and didn’t realize that it was from Marshall. She should have just apologized. Compare Marshall’s line:

    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.

    to Dowd’s:

    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.

    Almost precisely the same words, with just one change of noun (“we were” to “the Bush crowd was”). Hard to believe she was merely quoting something a friend told her, unless both she and her friend have amazing photographic memories.

  4. What makes this all ironic is that Dowd played a major role in exposing a somewhat similar case of plagiarism against Joe Biden back in 1988. When Biden made excuses for borrowing other’s words, Dowd went on the attack, which eventually resulted in Biden withdrawing from the presidential race. Does Dowd deserve the same treatment?
This was written by Iron Knee. Posted on Monday, May 18, 2009, at 1:09 am. Filed under Irony. Tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

6 Comments

  1. F. Charles Anderson wrote:

    Careful, IK — Dowd quotes AND CREDITS John Marshall AND TPM in her editorial. That’s not plagiarism.

    Monday, May 18, 2009 at 3:51 am | Permalink
  2. Richard wrote:

    Charles: The credit came later, read the bottom of the editorial page.

    “This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

    Correction: May 18, 2009
    Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.”

    Monday, May 18, 2009 at 5:26 am | Permalink
  3. starluna wrote:

    “Does Dowd deserve the same treatment?”

    Yes.

    But I don’t like Dowd. I find her to be intellectually vacuous. I find no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt.

    Monday, May 18, 2009 at 7:04 am | Permalink
  4. Iron Knee wrote:

    Charles, it is plagiarism if you update the article to give credit AFTER you get caught. Even worse if you give some lame excuse for the original plagiarism.

    But to the NYT’s credit, they did make a correction and added proper credit.

    Monday, May 18, 2009 at 8:17 am | Permalink
  5. Lee-Anne wrote:

    PM editor Josh Marshal himself was parroting the ideas of other writers who’d been writing about this subject for weeks previous to his blog, not one of which is attributed, but simply lifted from the popular press and other bloggers. He may have supplied original words, and badly-written awkward words at that, but ideas deserve credit every bit as much as mere words.

    Most columnists and bloggers regurgitate the ideas of others; they have small budgets, few informants, and little or no direct contact with the sources that generate these ideas, so they can hardly be blamed too very much, but Josh has lately been very ungracious about this tempest in a teapot, fueled at least in part by deliberate and focused right-wing hatred of Ms Dowd herself.

    Indeed, the above post is mostly a “me too” without much, if any, unique contribution to the debate.

    Monday, May 18, 2009 at 2:26 pm | Permalink
  6. Iron Knee wrote:

    I love it when people accuse Political Irony of not making a big contribution to the debate. This is a humor site!

    Jon Stewart has the same problem with The Daily Show — people keep taking him seriously!

    Monday, May 18, 2009 at 2:34 pm | Permalink

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