No Mojo for MoDo

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There are people who love Maureen Dowd's column in the Times. I'm not a huge fan, myself, but she does have the occasional good insight.

I am a huge fan of Josh Marshall, so I do get annoyed when people, especially bigfoot journalists, steal his work and don't give him credit, like MoDo did Sunday.

After she got called on it she admitted it. At least, she admitted that the words in her column had apparently come from somewhere else. Really, what choice did she have? You judge for yourself.

Josh wrote:

“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.”

Maureen wrote:

“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.”

I'll save you the trouble of counting. It's forty-five words, and the only change is from “we were” to “the Bush crowd was”. Dowd's explanation is that she got the line from a friend and reproduced it in her column. Even if you grant that as a professional writer she may have a slightly greater sensitivity to, and recollection of words, than most people, do you believe that she heard this sentence one time, in a conversation, and was able to reproduce it in her column, word for word, down to the punctuation?

Or if you're like me, maybe your first reaction was, “My sweet lord!”

10 thoughts on “No Mojo for MoDo”

  1. (I don’t read M. Dowd)

    You write her claim is (as you put it) “that she got the lie from a friend ..”.

    Hell, could’ve been on a postcard.

    Awful hard to be original with words and music nowadays.

  2. Dowd’s original explanation was very specific about hearing Marshall’s line in a casual chat:

    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.

    That’s pretty conclusive. And no, I don’t think it’s possible for anyone this side of Rainman to accurately reproduce a lengthy quote after hearing it in a casual conversation.

    I say it’s a clear, if relatively minor, case of plagiarism. I suspect that a columnist who’s occupied the position for long enough gets (a) a bit too full of him/herself, and (b) a little lazy. (Call it Mike Barnicle Syndrome, if you like.) The latter lends itself to borrowing content and ideas, and the former makes the columnist uninclined to give proper credit.  

  3. …that she doesn’t do all her own writing– not that she lifts stuff from other people, but that she pays interns to do some of it for her.

    I wonder if she uses the same hiring agency that Martha Rainville did.

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