May 17, 2009

not a good excuse for plagiarism

The situation:
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution.

Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.
The explanation in Dowd's own words:
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.
How not to excuse your own plagiarism: "No, I didn't copy it from that guy. I copied it from somebody else."

2 comments:

MTGAP said...

"How not to excuse your own plagiarism: 'No, I didn't copy it from that guy. I copied it from somebody else.' "

A few weeks ago, I was in an online debate with someone and he did the exact same thing. He plagiarized his entire argument, and then tried to excuse it by saying a friend had given it to him. Apparently, it's a rather common phenomenon.

Jim Anderson said...

Some day, we won't even have writers. We'll just have data miners.