Monday, May 18, 2009

Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes?!

From Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters:
On a regular basis, NewsBusters has warned readers of the infiltration into traditional media outlets content written by left-wing bloggers.
On Sunday, Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo accused New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of plagiarizing a piece he posted a few days ago.
Dowd has now admitted her mistake.
As Marshall wrote Thursday:

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.

Dowd wrote before she got caught:
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.

As such, Dowd merely substituted "the Bush crowd was" for "we were." The rest is exactly the same.
Dowd's piece now reflects her admission:

Josh Marshall said in his blog: “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.” [...]

An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

So, we not only have so-called journalists channeling nonsense from the liberal blogosphere, but now they're just cutting-and-pasting from it.
And newspaper owners wonder why their subscription rates continue to plummet.

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