Plagiarism or Just Irresponsible Journalism?
Yesterday this paragraph showed up in Maureen Dowd’s Sunday New York Times column:
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.
Fine, no big deal. Except, it showed up in a blog post by Joshua Marshall on Thursday (NYTimes.com has since been changed). the nytpicker has a good rundown of what happened, including a nice roundup where they say they believe Dowd when she says it wasn’t plagiarism (she is claiming it came from a friend), however, they wonder is it right “to take the expression of a friend’s idea — the words themselves — and place it into a piece of writing that appears under her byline, as though it were not only her idea, but also her singular expression of that idea”?