Maureen is on vacation. Since she didn’t do anything wrong, there would be no reason for a suspension.

That, of course, would be contrary to Hoyt’s view, who delivered a mild rebuke to Dowd last Sunday after she lifted a paragraph from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo without attribution. In addressing Dowd’s claim that she had taken the e-mailed passage from a friend without realizing it had originally come from Marshall, Hoyt wrote:

I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said journalists collaborate and take feeds from each other all the time. That is true with news articles, but readers have a right to expect that even if an opinion columnist like Dowd tosses around ideas with a friend, her column will be her own words. If the words are not hers, she must give credit.

No, Hoyt’s views are not those of Times management. Even so, I’m surprised Mathis would say something so definitive in defense of Dowd just days after Hoyt offered a different view. But there you go.

Over the past week, I’ve thought a lot about plagiarism in the context of teaching journalism students. So it’s relevant to point out that, at Northeastern, we define plagiarism as “intentionally representing the words, ideas, or data of another as one’s own … without providing proper citation.” Based on what we now know, I sort of agree and sort of disagree that Dowd did not plagiarize. And I definitely agree that what she did wasn’t right.

When the news broke that Dowd had copied more than 40 words from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo without quotation marks and without attribution, my first thought was that bloggers would pore over everything Dowd had written to see if they could find other examples. Well, it’s been a week, and the Marshall incident still stands alone. I don’t think it’s plausible that Dowd would suddenly start plagiarizing at the age of 57. So not only is this a first-time offense, but it speaks, I think, to a lack of malice aforethought on her part.

Earlier in the week, I and other commentators wrote that we had a hard time believing Dowd could be telling the truth when she said she had somehow managed to insert Marshall’s words, almost verbatim, based on a casual conversation she’d had with a friend. She has now clarified that, telling Hoyt she’d exchanged e-mails with a friend — still unnamed — and then copied and pasted his or her thoughts from the e-mail into her column.

That is a pretty lame way to write a column, and as Hoyt says, readers have a right to expect that a columnist, as opposed to a news reporter, will use her own words except when quoting others. Dowd’s editor, Andrew Rosenthal, disagrees.

Now, this may surprise readers who’ve never worked in a newsroom, but Rosenthal’s take is pretty much in sync with the way journalists work. As an editor, I have written whole paragraphs into opinion pieces by people with well-known bylines. As a writer, I’ve had editors do the same with me. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that journalism is a collaborative process; it’s another to have friends help you write your column, and then turn it in to your editors without telling them.

If intentional theft is at the heart of plagiarism, then Dowd didn’t plagiarize Marshall. But she did plagiarize her friend, even if she did it with that friend’s acquiescence. And though she may never have lifted someone’s published words before last week, it could well be that she frequently cobbles together e-mails from friends in the course of writing — assembling? — her column.

At Media Matters, Eric Boehlert calls on the Times to produce the e-mail. At Scripting News, Dave Winer offers a similar view. My own take at this point is that Dowd not only owes us a fuller explanation, but she also owes her readers an apology. A brief suspension wouldn’t be out of order, either. It’s not a matter of wrecking her career; it’s a matter of basic accountability.

By far the most logical explanation would be that Dowd copied and pasted the Marshall passage herself with the intention of crediting him, and then forgot to do so. We could all understand that. Because she has given us something so much less straightforward, and because we still don’t know everything, I wonder if something else is going on.

At the Nytpicker, Amy Alkon asks something I’ve been wondering myself. Is it possible that an assistant did most of the work, including grabbing the Marshall quote without attribution, and that Dowd is now covering for both the assistant and herself? Normally I don’t like engaging in such speculation. But given the lack of transparency on the part of Dowd and her editors, I see no reason why we can’t offer some educated guesses.

Unfortunately, Dowd had the day off today. She should be writing her next column for Wednesday’s paper. I’ll extend to her the same invitation she received from Slate’s Jack Shafer last week: She should use her column to tell us what happened, how it happened and what she’s learned from the experience.

The standards to which she is held ought to be at least as high as those expected of any college sophomore.

Photo of Maureen Dowd (cc) by Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

• Despite Jack Shafer’s splendid suggestion that Dowd offer a full accounting of what happened in today’s column, she instead weighs in with an insipid imaginary conversation between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Gah.
• Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, whose words were appropriated without credit by Dowd in her Sunday column, says he “never thought it was intentional,” and “that’s pretty much the end of it.”
• The New York Post has picked up my Guardian column on the matter. Sure, I’m getting a kick out of it. But I’m also less than thrilled to be drafted by Rupert Murdoch into his ongoing pissing match with the Sulzbergers.

OK, so Dowd was “talking” in a “spontaneous” manner with a friend, as she put it to the Huffington Post. Fine. I had decided to assume for the purpose of moving on that by “talking” she meant “e-mailing.” It would be completely believable if she had copied and pasted from a friend’s e-mail who had volunteered to help her write her column. Lame, but believable.

And yet here is what she told a blog called the Nytpicker, via e-mail:

no, we were going back and forth discussing the topic of the column and he made this point and i thought it was a good one and wanted to weave it in;
i just didn’t realize it was josh marshall’s point, and we’ve now given him credit
my friend didn’t want to be quoted; but of course i would have been happy to give credit to another writer, as i often do

I don’t see how you can possibly construe this as an e-mail exchange, especially when, as you will see, the Nytpicker had contacted her a second time trying to clarify exactly how Dowd had managed to reproduce Marshall’s rather lengthy graf almost word for word. Hey, she was just talking with a friend. Right.

(Via an e-mail to Media Nation citing National Review’s Media Blog, which in turn got it from DailyKos.)

In an e-mail to Media Nation, Shafer also fingered an attribution I’d messed up in my Guardian column, which has now been corrected. I’d misattributed a Dowd e-mail to the wrong source. Thank you, Jack.

Or so I argue in the Guardian.

The New York Times has already updated Dowd’s column to credit Marshall, but there’s no acknowledgment that there was a problem in the first place.

OK, this is premature, but here is Dowd friend Howell Raines’ 1998 takedown of the Boston Globe, which he chastises for failing to fire star columnist Mike Barnicle after he’d been caught plagiarizing one-liners from a book by George Carlin.

I would imagine Times editors are going to have to do something even if Dowd’s explanation pans out. I’d also guess that the next 24 hours will be key. Right now, we can assume that dozens (hundreds?) of bloggers are scouring every column she’s ever written.

If she can survive that, then she’ll get through this. If not, then all bets are off.

Update: Dowd responds. And I was wrong. She’s claiming a friend fed her the line.

So why does Eagan think Kerry lost? Among other things, she writes, “Lots of us didn’t like Kerry: the faux Kennedy thing. The Brahmin-esque cadence. ‘Who among us,’ he bellowed as often as McCain says ‘my friends.’ “

Actually, he didn’t. Bear with me. I’m about to write way too much about a small matter, but it galls me. Eagan should know better. We all should know better. To the extent that the haughty “who among us” construction was used to demonstrate that Kerry was not a man of the people, it’s important to point out that it was all based on a falsehood.

First, let’s deal with the origin of “who among us” — a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times in which Kerry was quoted as saying, “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?” She got it wrong. She wasn’t even there when he said (or rather didn’t say) it. The Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby has demonstrated conclusively that Kerry actually said, “There isn’t one of us here who doesn’t like NASCAR and who isn’t a fan.” Case closed.

Except that it wasn’t. Because the NASCAR quote was used over and over during the 2004 campaign to show that Kerry was a pompous fake who undermined his own attempt to appeal to NASCAR fans with his phony Brahmin language. As Somerby shows, Times people themselves did it over and over, but they were not alone. I dove into LexisNexis and found numerous examples. Here are just a few instances of writers either mocking Kerry’s diction or falsely quoting him:

I’m sick of Kerry pretending to be a normal guy. Killing a goose to get the gun vote. Saying, “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?” to get the racing vote. (Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News, Oct. 27, 2004.)

Unless you’re a teetotaling philistine, few things go better together than a good read and a good stiff drink. As John Kerry might say, who among us does not like to curl up with a Tom Clancy novel and can of Bud? (Jerry Salamon, Austin American-Statesman, Oct. 24, 2004)

As John Kerry himself has asked: “Who among us does not like NASCAR?” (Bruce Feirstein, New York Observer, May 17, 2004)

Believe me, this is just a tiny sample, and I’m leaving out what Dowd’s colleagues at the Times did, since you can read Somerby for yourself. Which brings me to the next question. The NASCAR falsehood aside, does Kerry favor the “who among us” construction? Not particularly. I did a search from Jan. 1 through Nov. 15, 2004, and came up with just a few examples, all from formal speeches or prepared remarks. Here they are:

In the wake of Sept. 11, who among us can say, with any certainty, to anybody, that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater — a nuclear weapon — then invade Kuwait, push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further his ambition to be the pan-Arab leader? (Kerry spoke these words in 2002, and they were quoted on numerous occasions during the 2004 campaign to demonstrate that Kerry had believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.)

Who among us is more vulnerable today than the 8 million Americans who are out of work? Who is more vulnerable than the 45 million Americans without health insurance? Who is more vulnerable than the parents who have to choose between food and medicine for their children? (From a speech Kerry delivered in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Oct. 24, 2004.)

Who among us thinks it’s right to say so quickly, on short notice, before you even know where your next paycheck’s going to come from; before you know, if you haven’t been working, what skill you can apply to be able to earn a paycheck; before you’ve been able to adjust to the loss and begin to be able to get back into life? (From a Kerry speech cited by John Harris of the Washington Post as evidence that Kerry was something of a fumblemouth. According to the text of the speech, Kerry was supposed to say, “Who among us could move on short notice when you don’t even know where your paycheck will come from?”)

And that’s all I could find. That’s not to say there aren’t other examples out there. But it’s ridiculous to think Kerry is wedded to “who among us” as any sort of rhetorical crutch, at least based on the available evidence.

By the way, at the Republican National Convention in 2004, John McCain said:

All of us, despite the differences that enliven our politics, are united in the one big idea that freedom is our birthright and its defense is always our first responsibility.

All other responsibilities come second.

We must not lose sight of that as we debate who among us should bear the greatest responsibility for keeping us safe and free.

Not to pick on Margery Eagan. The journalist who bears the responsibility for this is Maureen Dowd. But can we finally put this urban legend to rest?

Kerry photo (cc) by the World Economic Forum and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.