Plagiarism at the New York Times?

The face of a plagiarist?



A post over at DemocraticUnderground has alerted me of a feud between the blog TalkingPointsMemo and The New York Times's Maureen Dowd:

A reader of the progressive blog "Talkingpointsmemo" accuses Maureen Dowd of the New York Times of plagiarizing words originally written by TPM founder Joshuah Marshall.

Dowd wrote the following paragraph on Saturday:

"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."

Marshall had written the following paragraph on Thursday:

""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."

What do you all think? Is this plagiarism? It's kind of an awkward phrase, and it really isn't the sort of thing you'd say off-hand. It's eerily similar.

If it does in fact turn out that Maureen Dowd lifted this quotation without permission, it'll be especially ironic, considering her outrage over Joe Biden's plagiarism of two decades ago.

Update 3:24 PM: The New York Times has now conceded that the words were taken and has added Josh Marshall's name to the article online.