Regret the Error

In her weekend column, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd included a sentence that later turned out to be taken almost verbatim from Talking Points Memo. (Compare here.) She failed to include any attribution, and this caused TPM and others to accuse her of plagiarism. Dowd emailed a response to the allegations to the Nytpicker blog and Huffington Post:

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
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.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Here’s the correction that was appended to her column:

Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Among others, Gawker has a look at Dowd’s excuse for her failure of attribution:

Who is this mysterious friend who helps Dowd limp across the finish line of the marathon that is two 750 word columns per week for the Times? Was the conversation in question over the phone, in which Dowd would have written down her friend’s words in a note, or was it via email or instant messenger, where perhaps there’s an electronic record of the exchange? And finally, why was Dowd needing help expressing the thought contained in the passage in question, a sequence of words which, with no disrespect directed at Josh Marshall, don’t seem all that remarkable. It’s a point well made with words, for sure, but it’s not something that couldn’t have been expressed in a number of different ways.

It is remarkable, and not in a good way, that Dowd was given the idea by a friend and then ended up writing it almost exactly the same as it appeared on TPM. It seems strange. That said, failures of attribution do occur, and they always raise suspicion. (Sometimes, failure of attribution is cited to cover up actual instances of plagiarism.)

The Guardian had a recent failure:

An article about Adam Carroll, A1 Grand Prix championship driver, published online under the heading Adam Carroll aiming for formula one after A1GP success, 5 May, failed to acknowledge that the quotes from Carroll used in the piece came from an interview by Will Buxton published in the 4 May issue of GPWeek, an online magazine. We apologise for this lapse.

Which makes this Guardian error about the Dowd story all the more interesting/amusing.