Her next column comes tomorrow and inquiring minds are eager to hear how, precisely, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times columnist managed to “inadvertently lift” an entire passage from a blog post and insert it into her Sunday column. Slate‘s Jack Shafer credits Dowd for her quick response to inquiries about the plagiarism, for the quick correction to the column, and for “taking her lumps and not whining about it.” But, as Shafer writes,
As long as she’s in the business, somebody will be taunting her about it. The best and perhaps only way for Dowd to set things right will be to proceed directly to Step 7 and tell her readers in detail how she came to commit this transgression.
Maybe we will finally get a column that isn’t laced with catty name-calling and too-cute-by-half phrases. Or, perhaps, a friend will offer Maureen a plausible explanation for how a whole paragraph could be transferred from a conversation to a column, and then Dowd can just cut, paste, and file.
