Megan Aquino, Victor Camargo, Vayshon Hesz, & Bailey Jackson

1. The Perils of Plagiarism:
Maureen Dowd
Megan Aquino, Victor Camargo,
Vayshon Hesz, Bailey Jackson
Taiz/Bell
Period 1 & 2

2. Who is Maureen Dowd?
• Maureen Dowd was born in
Washington D.C.
• She received a Bachelor of Arts
degree in English literature from
Catholic University of Washington D.C.
• Dowd started her journalism career
in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The
Washington Star.
• There, she wrote as a sports
columnist, metropolitan reporter, and
feature writer.

3. Who is Maureen Dowd?
• In 1981, The Washington Star
closed and Dowd joined Time
Magazine.
• In 1983, Dowd joined The New
York Times as a metropolitan
reporter.
• Maureen Dowd has written two
columns a week for The New
York Times since 1995.
• Dowd was a winner of the 1999
Pulitzer Price for distinguished
commentary.

4. What,Where, & When: Maureen
Dowd vs. Talking Points Memo
• On Saturday, May 18, 2009, Maureen Dowd wrote about
Republican policies in her weekend column in The New York
Times.
• This column included a 43-word paragraph that was almost
word-for-word to one written by Josh Marshall on the political
website Talking Points Memo.

5. What,Where & When: Maureen
Dowd vs. Talking Points Memo
•The similarity was first noticed by Talking Points Memo the next
morning.
• By evening, Dowd had publically apologized in an e-mail to
Huffington Post claiming she had never read Marshall’s column,
and the general idea of the paragraph came from a friend who
had been helping her write her report the day earlier.

6. Comparing the two
paragraphs:
• The only difference between the two paragraphs is that in Dowd’s version, “we”
is changed to “the Bush crowd”.
•Dowd:
“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.”

7. Comparing the two
paragraphs:
•Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:
“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.”

8. Intentional Act of Plagiarism
or Honest Mistake?
Was the 2009 Maureen Dowd plagiarism
controversy an intentional act of
plagiarism or a honest mistake?
• Many people believe Dowd when she said in her
Huffington Post apology that she had gotten the idea of the
paragraph from a friend that was helping her.
They say Maureen Dowd is a columnist who has
written hundreds of articles in her career & it is easy
to make a mistake.

9. Intentional Act of Plagiarism
or Honest Mistake?
Was the 2009 Maureen Dowd plagiarism controversy an
intentional act of plagiarism or a honest mistake?
•All the same, many people argue that Maureen Dowd’s 45-
word paragraph is too similar to Josh Marshall’s 43-word
paragraph, and that it is impossible for one to come up with
a paragraph so similar without having have looked at the
original first.
They argue Dowd most likely plagiarized the
paragraph off of TalkingPointsMemo.com because
she assumed no one would notice, as TPM is far less
popular than The New York Times.

10. In Conclusion…
Whether you think that
Maureen Dowd plagiarized
the paragraph or not, we can
all agree that the two articles
of writing are very similar…
… So whether you are a
student in an ACHS classroom
or a weekly columnist in The
New York Times, try to cite your
sources, check your websites,
and steer as far away from
plagiarizing as you can!