Over the weekend an eagle-eyed blogger spotted similarities between one paragraph of NY Times columnist and author Maureen Dowd’s weekend column and a recent post by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.
According to a TPM blogger, the two paragraphs seemed practically identical. Dowd–most recently the author of “Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide” and “Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk”–published her column over the weekend. Here’s Dowd’s paragraph (published May 16): “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.”
And here’s what Marshall wrote last week at his TPM blog (published May 14): “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.” UPDATE: NYTPicker and HuffPo both have email statements from Dowd. Simon Owens has comments from the TPM bloggers. (Via Jay Rosen)
> UPDATE: The NY Times has modified the story and added this note: “An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.”