Sunday, May 17, 2009

BREAKING: Did Maureen Dowd Plagiarize Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall? Sure Looks That Way.

Did Maureen Dowd lift a paragraph of today's NYT column from a blog post last Thursday by Joshua Micah Marshall, on his respected Talking Points Memo?

So a blog called "The Joshua Blog" has just suggested in a post on TPMCafe, on the Talking Points Memo website. A side-by-side comparison of the two paragraphs appear identical.

From Dowd's column today:

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.

From Marshall's Thursday post:

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.

Sure looks like a cut-and-paste to us. We've got emails in to Dowd and the NYT for comment.

It's worth noting that in 1987, Dowd broke the story of then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden's pagiarism of a speech by a British Labor Party politician named Neil Kinnock. That story helped to abort the Biden candidacy that year.

Marshall, the publisher of Talking Points Memo, is a widely-respected 40-year-old Princeton graduate with a Ph.D from Brown. In addition to his website, Marshall writes a column for Time Magazine, and has done articles for numerous major magazines about politics and foreign policy. He launched TPM during the 2000 Florida recount.

1 comment:

Roberto said...

That paragraph is quite a bit less self-absorbed and frivolous than her usual fare ... possibly why she needed to go outside for it.