Hey! You Stole my think!

By Media Farm

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FEW CHARGES ARE more serious to a serious journalist than the accusation of plagiarism ... unless the journalism itself isn't serious, and the words being lifted are the journalistic equivalent of "I picked my nose and eated it."

That's why we think the battle raging between the two Somervillian papers is so ... cute! This is from the Somerville Journal's website:

Its [sic] always "interesting" how the Somerville News comes up with stories very similar to ours a day or two after we post ours online.

But having an almost exact copy of the Living Green story that our intern recently wrote is just wrong.

Our story went live May 18 and theirs on May 20.

It's nefarious how the News, which comes out weekly on Wednesdays, went to print with the story on a ... Wednesday. Weekly schedules being the crawling nightmare that they are, the paper probably went to the printer on a Tuesday, which means the story was probably filed on Monday (at the latest), which is ... the same day the story went live on the Journal's website. That would have to be some pretty fast-paced "journalism."

And the Journal kinda proved our point when they really put the intern who wrote the story to work, offering a series of side-by-side comparisons, showing that both papers used the same clichés and facts. Like:

Them: Approximately 200 Somerville residents from all walks of life and of all ages attended the Living Green Festival on Saturday afternoon.

Me: The festival drew people from all walks of life, including both seasoned environmentalists and families with children, Barillaro said.

We think this was a case of two local papers covering the same glossy-eyed "Hey, this event happened ... that's news, right?" story, and going off press releases and the same "Gee whiz, that was the best event ever" quotes that all organizers spew. It's lazy, not criminal.

NOW THIS IS plagiarism: Maureen Dowd, who butchers the English language one column at a time, lifted an entire paragraph from Josh Marshall's chunk of opinion on Talking Points Memo. Of all the sentences in all the world to steal, this one is the cubic zirconium of thefts. It's a clunker, and she could have stolen the (rather old) idea without using the same wording, and would have avoided all this fuss (but, being Maureen Dowd, would probably somehow manage to make its awkward construction more infuriating):

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.

Dowd's only alteration was to changing "we" to "the Bush crowd." After all, no one called in Maureen to torture prisoners (forcing them to read her column every week would probably do it).

Now, the fellows over at Gawker have heralded this as the ultimate "haw haw" to the New York Times, which has been wringing its hands and crossing itself every time someone mentions the blogosphere, in an effort to protect itself from seeing anymore of its content lifted. Well, touché.

But Maureen Dowd has always been an embarrassment to the Times, so why should this surprise us? Did anyone read the lede of that infamous column?

Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.

Nancy Pelosi's bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest—and harpy-est—weeks in a long time. They relished casting Pelosi as contemptible for not fighting harder to stop their contemptible depredations against the Constitution. That's Cheneyesque chutzpah.

Oh! So much alliteration and poor punning power! You're making us blush! So a lazy and sluggish policy made Pelosi stammer on the torture issue? (Saturnine: ur doin it wrong.) Also, thanks for making us hate the Yiddish language, shiksa.

Maureen Dowd is the rich man's Dan Shaughnessy, and somehow, both of them, along with press release reporters the world over, still have jobs.