The Maureen Dowd Nexus

One day, in journalism schools of the future, students will be presented with a graph showing the rise of internet-based news -- including blogs -- and the coinciding fall of print-based, establishment news -- including The New York Times. This graph will feature many labeled points, such as the birth of the Drudge Report, the downfall of Dan Rather and eventually, the first presidential interview by a blog. But there will be another mark on this media meta-map: The Dowd Nexus.

Last week, Maureen Dowd lifted the words of a blogger from Talking Points Memo in her weekly column, one about Dick Cheney, Nancy Pelosi and the torture fiasco. Dowd's plagiarism was a near word-for-word reprint of a paragraph written by Joshua Marshall at TPM. The case has been well discussed here at The Huffington Post and many other places.

The Times quickly "corrected" the "error", adding the words "Josh Marshall said in his blog" to the beginning of the filched paragraph and appending a note to the column explaining that Dowd's column (note: not Dowd herself) failed to attribute the quote.

It's not possible to know whether Dowd intentionally stole the words, if she absentmindedly added them, or if a staff member helped cobble the piece together and made a stupid mistake. But it doesn't really matter either.

The New York Times has been famously above the fray when it comes what kind of media it is. It is the establishment, it insists -- not just the standard bearer, but the standard itself. It goes to great pains, which include a huge news room with reporters all over the world, to maintain its century-old identity as America's flagship newspaper even if, as a newspaper, it has a website.

Dowd herself underscored this Times attitude just six years ago in a column she titled, with her typical twang of haughtiness, "Blah Blah Blog." It's incredible to think, even from a 2003 perspective, that Dowd could have opened that week's column with the thesis-style question, "Is the internet over?" There were many reasons, according to Dowd, to think the world wide web was falling one "W" at a time, not least of which was the ruinous outcome of the AOL-Time Warner deal. But, Dowd philosophized, "The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment."

In all fairness, she was referring at that time to the political establishment. But the core of the point was there -- blogs were the media other, and as a political force had been usurped.

Six years later and Maureen Dowd is reprinting the words of a blogger about a political topic. And in The New York Times, no less. Whether she committed an ethical offense, broke the law, or made an innocent mistake is a separate issue, and a much less interesting one. The real issue is that the blog insurgency is no longer an insurgency: with a full paragraph expressing a substantive idea about the most important issue in the news cycle coming directly from a blog and printed in the media's noblest house, the blogosphere has clearly started to overrun (in Dowd's words) the media establishment.

In her hedged admission of guilt, Dowd admitted she had made a mistake and, in a way, apologized. The issue of stolen or inappropriately borrowed words is fairly settled. The other issue, that this little incident stands for much more than what it seems, is not one that needs an apology or a correction. Inadvertently, Maureen Dowd showed us that the media, in its progression from establishment to grass root, from paper to pixel, has reached the Dowd Nexus and is now irretrievably past the point of no return.

Comments

[Ed Urbanowski]

If Ms. Dowd quotes me all I ask is that she get the spelling of my name correct...This is her first such instance, can anyone cut the lady some slack?

[S1m0n]

Plagiarism is an academic offense, and hence meaningless in any other context. The copied portion is well below the 'fair use' cutoff, so copyright law doesn't apply, either. No doubt the Times has its own internal code of ethics, which Dowd's misdeed might have transgressed. No other rules apply.