UPDATE: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an email to Huffington Post, admits that a paragraph in her Sunday column was lifted from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall's blog last Thursday.
Dowd claims that she never read his blog last week but was told the line by a friend of hers. In a follow-up email, she forwarded her desire to apologize to Marshall, writing that had she known, she would have gladly credited Marshall.
Dowd notes that the Times is fixing her column online to give proper credit to Marshall and that a correction will run tomorrow;
josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
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.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.
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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is being accused of plagiarizing from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall.
This afternoon, a blogger named "thejoshuablog" (not Marshall) at TPM Cafe claimed that a paragraph in Dowd's Sunday column matches a paragraph from Josh Marshall's story that appeared on TPM last Thursday.
Dowd 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.
Marshall 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.
Blogger "thejoshuablog" notes that the only difference is that Dowd changed "we were" to "the Bush crowd was."
And he concludes:
So, if this isn't outright plagiarism by a top NY Times Editorialist, than I'm a happily married, straight man with 4 kids, 2 dogs, a lovely 2nd wife of 15 years with a girl half my age on the side.
Which I assure you all, I am not.
Back in 1987, Dowd herself is the one who exposed then-presidential candidate Joe Biden's plagiarism of British politician Neil Kinnock's speeches.
A spokesperson for the Times and Marshall have not returned emails for comment.