Was Maureen Dowd Suspended By The New York Times?
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Immediately the story broke, her opponents wasted no time in declaring that Mo had lost her mojo.
This morning, when her column was again not published in the New York Times, I became concerned. It is the second week in a row.
Since the accusation of plagiarism emerged, star New York Time columnist, Maureen Dowd has written just one article- a fictional piece about Dick Cheney and his obsession with torture.
Three weeks ago, Maureen Dowd was accused of lifting a paragraph from the work of Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo without attribution. In her defense, she claimed that she spoke to a friend who gave her the paragraph on the phone.
According to Ms. Dowd, her friend "must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me".
Followers of the issue found it difficult to believe that Maureen Dowd’s friend could have read Marshall’s work, remembered all the 42 words in the paragraph exactly as it was written.
The public editor of the Times, Clark Hoyt, wrote penultimate Sunday that he did not think Ms Dowd plagiarized but also that what she did was not right. Since then, her column had not appeared in the Times.
Even today, as Thomas Friedman’s column returns after he was accused of violating Times’ policy by collecting $75,000 for a speech on clean energy from the state of California, Ms. Dowd’s column remains in hiatus. Freidman was forced to return the money and apologized. He blamed it on his agent who thought the speech was being paid for by a non-profit organization.
The spokesman for the Times, Catherine Mathis said that Ms Dowd was not suspended but rather is on vacation.
But is it a forced vacation? Will Mo find her mojo when she comes back?
