Dowd kicks another hole in the Times' credibility

It hasn't been a good decade for the New York Times - first writers Jayson Blair and Judith Miller kicked some huge holes in the paper's credibility with their slipshod (or outright fictional) reporting, then the Times was hit by the economic downturn that's driven some of the country's biggest daily newspapers into bankruptcy. Now another of their writers is being called out for plagiarism.

Columnist Maureen Dowd now admits (sort of) that she lifted parts of her Sunday column from a blog post last Thursday authored by Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. Dowd's first claimed that she never read Marshall's blog and that the parts of her column in question came from a conversation with a friend of hers. Then the Huffington Post did a side-by-side comparison showing an entire paragraph of Dowd's column was basically a word-for-word copy of Marshall's post, wrecking her ‘friend’ excuse.

Dowd has apologized and said that the Times will properly credit Marshall in their online edition. Frankly, that explanation is BS - if she just 'forgot' to credit Marshall for an entire paragraph of her column then why this story about writing that graph after talking to her friend?

All I know is that if I had pulled a stunt like that back in journalism school and was caught like Dowd has been, I would have been kicked out of school. For the sake of its credibility, the Times should do the same thing to Dowd.