Word: columnizing
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...weekend column, Dowd sought to highlight the irony of the Republicans' holding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's feet to the fire for not opposing Republican policies on torture aggressively enough. Interesting as this line of thinking might have been, it subsequently drowned in the backwash of controversy over her almost verbatim use of a 43-word paragraph that had already appeared in a column written by Josh Marshall on the political website Talking Points Memo. (Read about how to save your newspaper...
...similarity was first noticed by TPM on Sunday, and by the evening a mortified Dowd had apologized, saying she had not read Marshall's column but that evidently someone she knew had. "I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing," she wrote in an e-mail to the Huffington Post, among others, "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." The Times amended the Web version and noted the correction...
...blogosphere quickly pointed out, this idea was not so much woven into Dowd's column as slathered in Elmer's and pasted right on. It seemed implausible, many noted, that Dowd could repeat word for word what she said she heard. Or that the friend had expressed the idea in precisely the same way as Marshall without knowing it. And if the idea was not her own, why didn't she attribute the friend...
...would have been, the eighth person Dowd cited in her 16-paragraph story, which quoted four sources directly. It's that cherry-picking of others' thoughts and opinions that agitates her detractors, of whom she has many - even (or especially?) within the Times newsroom. In one Dowd column on anti-Semitic remarks made by Mel Gibson in 2006, more than half the text comprised direct quotes from her friend New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier. "It was seven paragraphs of a 13-paragraph story," grumbles one Times staffer...
...stuff of recession-era tragedy. Christopher once came home to find his mother in a neck brace: she had curtsied too low to a duchess and caught a heel in her pearls. The Buckleys weren't plutocrats, but William's prodigious output--he could bash out a 700-word column in five minutes flat--and Patricia's inheritance made them more than well off, and the action leaps nimbly from the family's teak-and-mahogany yacht to its 10th century Swiss château to Patricia's memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum's Temple of Dendur...