Plagiarism FAIL

The hot questions of the day seem to be whether the print media is dying, if it can be saved, if it should be saved at all.

I don't know the answer to these questions, but it seems a bad sign when a Very Serious Journalist from the print world is too lazy to come up with her own phrasing, and has to lift text straight from a blogger.  It may not be a direct sign of the increasing irrelevancy of the print media, but it sure is emblematic of it.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote last 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.

Maureen Dowd, a Very Serious Journalist from the New York Times, wrote in her column today (since changed to reflect that these were in fact Josh Marshall's words, although the original column was cached on TPM's website):

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.

That's it.  One phrase changed but otherwise the rest of the paragraph was copied verbatim.

Maureen Dowd has since offered a non-apology apology, claiming that she heard the line from a friend.  Which seems to imply that the friend memorized the line verbatim from TPM and that MoDo remembered that verbatim as well.  Amazing that she and her friend had such a detailed conversation on this line that even all of the commas fell into the same place!

Now, I don't want this controversy to overshadow the point they're both trying to make, that we may have tortured in order to get information to justify the war in Iraq.  That's an important point and needs to be investigated further.  But it just goes to show how irrelevant people like Maureen Dowd have become in this era, even as they try to maintain an air of Seriousness over those Cheetos-eating kids on their computers in their moms' basements who call themselves "bloggers."