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Monday, May 18, 2009

Media / Books / Nerd This Week in Plagiarism

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:35 PM

Did Maureen Dowd plagiarize from Talking Points Memo?

Did Jason Aaron plagiarize a Wolverine story from a comic book blogger?

At the moment, it looks like Dowd committed a cut-and-paste error. And Aaron's idea wasn't all that original to begin with. So, probably not on both counts.

(This post could've been about six times as long, but I'm into brevity today.)

Comments (10) RSS

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The real news is that people still read MoDo's columns rather than taking the far less painful option of eating rusty nails and washing them down with rubbing alcohol.

Posted by Original Andrew on May 18, 2009 at 5:39 PM

I can empathize with Dowd about the cut-and-paste error, but it is still plagiarism.

Posted by Drone on May 18, 2009 at 5:43 PM

I am pretty sure a cut and paste error is still plagiarism and honestly her excuses are pretty thin.

Posted by giffy on May 18, 2009 at 5:44 PM

Maureen Dowd's a twit. Please make her go away.

Posted by DOUG.

on May 18, 2009 at 6:00 PM

Her fingers slipped on CTRL C then CTRL V?

Posted by Original Andrew on May 18, 2009 at 6:13 PM

I wonder what Dowd would have to do to get fired from the NYT? Apparently plagiarism is not enough, or putting a fabricated dateline on a column, or making up quotes, or conducting a "relentless gender-laden assault against Hillary Clinton" (according to NYT's public editor). Or being batshit crazy and a terrible writer, of course.

Posted by unregistered user on May 18, 2009 at 6:46 PM

"A cut and paste error"? Are you fucking serious with that shit? What happened was someone emailed her having copy and pasted that paragraph themselves and slightly altering it without citing it, and then Maureen Dowd copied it from them thinking it was the original creation of her friend and not from a blog.

Regardless she's a talentless hack and so is her friend.

Posted by Dave M on May 18, 2009 at 8:48 PM

How do we expect serious journalists to survive if they cannot crib from teh evilz bloggerz?

Posted by bcrefugee on May 18, 2009 at 9:09 PM

Paul, what the fuck is a "cut-and-paste error", if not the most obvious kind of plagiarism there is? Please, explain. Please.

Posted by STJA on May 19, 2009 at 7:11 AM

The only legit way you can make a cut-and-paste error would be to cut-and-paste something that you thought you had written. If she's picking up paragraphs from friend's e-mails, then that's not a cut-and-paste error: that's misrepresenting a friend's idea as your own--which is still wrong even if your friend hadn't stole the idea from a blogger. The whole thing stinks.

Posted by David from Chicago on May 19, 2009 at 8:47 AM