Personal irritation alert

By Jennifer J. Foster

There is little that is more irritating to a writer seeking syndication than a syndicated writer who pulls something stupid—something, such as, what Maureen Dowd did this weekend.

According to the Associated Press:

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.

Dowd says it was an honest mistake, according to the AP, that she “never read Marshall’s post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall’s blog.“

So ... if that’s true, the friend from whom Dowd heard the line would have had to have remembered the sentence verbatim, and then Dowd would have had to have written it verbatim in her column.

Either that, or the fact that her version differed from Marshall’s by only two words was a complete coincidence.

You decide.

I don’t have a problem with Maureen Dowd generally. She’s a liberal columnist, so I don’t agree with her often. But I have plugged her here before, most recently when she wrote a column about the impact the San Francisco Chronicle has had on the city, its history and its politics.

But you know, this isn’t rocket science. Either what you write is your own stuff, or it isn’t.

This wasn’t.

To my knowledge, this is the first time Dowd has had a problem of this nature. So I hope she’s learned her lesson and she will take care to avoid a similarly embarrassing hit on her credibility in the future.