Dowd admits lifting line

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd appears to have been pinched for plagiarism. After being accused of stealing a passage from a post on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, Dowd told Huffington Post that she "inadvertently lifted" a line of text and used it in her weekend column. But TPM's thejoshuablog isn't ready to let her off the hook.

The view from above

It often takes awhile for the facts on the ground to filter up to the top. Take, for instance, the decrepit state of newspapers. If you've worked for a paper in, say, the MediaNews Group chain, you've known for several years now that we we're facing an emergency. Just this weekend, two of the most well-known columnists in the industry were compelled to finally panic - eloquently, of course.

Maureen Dowd (who'd written about the industry's decadence last month) used "Star Trek" as a trope to illustrate the troubles for newspapers. Frank Rich's Sunday column got more directly to the point, under the cheery title: "The American Press on Suicide Watch."

Indeed, Rich grabbed hold of what seems to me to be the central argument against placing our faith in technology to create Journalism 2.0 - namely, that there is no widget to get us around the strictures of capitalism. As Rich writes:

What can’t be reinvented is the wheel of commerce. Just because information wants to be free on the Internet doesn’t mean it can always be free. Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering. If a public that thinks nothing of spending money on texting or pornography doesn’t foot the bill for such reportage, it won’t happen.

(Of course, not everyone thinks professional journalism need continue. I'm too cranky right now to address that silliness.)

Rich and others look to the past and see a precedence for for-profit journalism:

It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

True. But journalism isn't cable or satellite, it's a few channels on a cable or satellite system. Already people pay a subscription of sorts to have Internet access, but the system doesn't kick anything down to the content providers.

Rich goes off the rails, however, when he casually asserts that some journalism (read, the local stuff papers like the New York Times don't cover) will be taken care of by "voluntary 'citizen journalists' with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site."

That kind of inverted pyramid - big paper journalism continuing to get funds while the local and regional stuff gets taken care of for free - cannot be sustained. Where does Rich think journalists will gain the "technical expertise" to ferret out "what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street" if not at smaller newspapers/news organizations? And what about the closed doors at City Hall or the school district? Are they suddenly easier to open? Are the standards for ferreting out the corruption outside of Washington and New York not as important?

If we're going down, we're going down together. Locking yourself in the captain's quarters won't save you when the ship begins to sink.

The virtue of cheap*

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times profiles reluctant visionary James Macpherson, who has changed the course of journalism by hiring Indian workers for cheap to transcribe Pasadena City Council meetings and rewrite city press releases for his online publication, Pasadena Now:

It’s not easy being a visionary, he said: “I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that’s a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you’re nuts.”

*UPDATED: (Via LA Observed) Macpherson blogs about his system of using nonprofessional sources to gather video and audio so that it can be used by reporters in India to write a story under the direction of a trained editor. The whole thing reads like a long rationalization: If one experienced editor oversees an operation, it doesn't matter how untrained or distant the newsgatherers might be. Indeed, if you set the standards low enough, most anything is possible.

My muse

Perhaps it is bad form for a writer to admit that another writer has done a better job of articulating his thoughts than he has himself, but what are you gonna do?

Maureen Dowd has a column today that comes about as close to my thoughts on the Clinton-Obama primary contest as anything I've read - including my own stuff. Hillary Clinton, I believe, suffers from a Nixonian sense of paranoia (I'm less convinced of the Dick Cheney comparison) that she seems to feel is a strength. But to defeat her, Barack Obama will have to make his own journey into darkness. Otherwise, he'll never be able to lead the nation into the light.

Which reminds me of something a friend of mine recently said about being tired of the poetry spouted by Obama in this campaign. She said poetry doesn't belong in politics.

I think she's wrong. Poetry belongs in politics, but it has to come from some place deeper inside the human soul. As with the blues, it has to be earned.