NEW YORK Timescolumnist Maureen Dowd has admitted using a passage taken from a blogger, almost word for word, in her column in the paper last Sunday.
The acerbic Irish-American columnist, who is one of the most celebrated journalists in the US, said she received the paragraph from a friend and was not aware that it had been extracted from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo.
In a column about former vice-president Dick Cheney’s defence of the use of torture, 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.”
The passage is identical to one that appeared on Marshall’s blog a few days earlier, apart from the fact that, instead of writing “the Bush crowd was”, the blogger wrote “we were”.
The New York Timesyesterday issued a correction.
Dowd’s column has also been amended online to attribute the paragraph at issue to Marshall.
Ms Dowd told the Huffington Postthat she had not read Mr Marshall's blog before she wrote Sunday's column.
“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,” she said.
“But, clearly, my friend must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me.”
