It was a wild Sunday for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. It opened with her latest column in the newspaper, which closed by declaring that she had once opposed a wide-ranging probe of the uses of torture and who authorized and knew about it during the Bush administration, but now favors it. This brought some praise from liberal news sites and bloggers often critical of Dowd.

But by mid-afternoon she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of “plagiarism” ensued.

By early evening, Dowd had admitted wrongdoing in an e-mail to The Huffington Post and said she wanted to apologize to Marshall. She also said the Times would issue a correction tomorrow — and the copy was changed in her column to attribute the paragraph to Marshall.

Also from her e-mail to The Huffington Post:

“Josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me …

I was talking to a friend of mine Friday, about what I was writing, who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and, I assumed, spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. But, clearly, my friend must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me.”

Dowd also sent an e-mail to POLITICO clarifying that “It’s a friend I talk to by phone and e-mail; I just had no idea that point was Josh’s.”

Maureen Dowd plagiarized. Goodness gracious, let’s take her out back to the woodshed and make her repent.

Wait, let’s not. We all plagiarize. I’ve read now a half-dozen articles about Dowd’s plagiarism. Every one of them mentioned the irony of how Dowd exposed Biden’s plagiarism way back when, and boy isn’t that the biggest of life’s ironies? Trouble is that each of these articles went on to point out how the world has a funny way of forgiving plagiarists. Biden did end up vice president, you might remember. Sorry, scribes, but the trafficking of cliches is a greater sin than the lifting of someone else’s copy.

Did Maureen Dowd commit a firing offense by, she says, inadvertently lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo? I don’t think so, but what happens hardly reflects well on Dowd or her column.

The Times ran a correction. End of story? Surely that’s what the Times and Dowd want, and in all probability their quick response — far superior to the grudging, circle-the-wagons responses to similar problems in the past — will be effective.

But the response raised more questions than it answers. Critics are focusing on the fact of Marshall’s words showing up in Dowd’s column. But in some sense that’s irrelevant. If she had known that paragraph came from TPM, it’s unlikely she would have reprinted it without attribution.

So was Dowd taking notes from a friend talking on the phone (who could have been reading straight from TPM)? Or did this friend simply cut-and-paste the TPM passage, and send it her way? It’s still unclear.

But assuming her explanation is true, and she’s soliciting input from friends and cutting and pasting it into columns, that’s worse in some ways than cribbing from published work. It meets the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” It’s also lazy, shoddy journalism. And it’s virtually undetectable.

Last year Dowd got into hot water for not attributing the reporting work of her assistant. Sunday’s incident gives us an additional window on the slapdash way a MoDo column is assembled. Dowd could be using the vast resources and reach of the Times and her substantial writer’s gifts to produce a great column. That’s the whole idea, right? Instead, it looks like the faux-juices kids drink — perhaps 50% real Maureen Dowd, 50% other ingredients.

Okay, stop. The words you’ve been reading?

Not mine.

I’d like to thank Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher (paragraphs 1-3); Lionel Beehner, former senior writer for the Council on Foreign Relations and Huffington Post contributor (paragraphs 9-10); John McQuaid, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Huffington Post contributor (paragraphs 11-13 and 15-16); and Michael Calderone, media reporter and blogger for Politico.com (paragraph 14).

I started reading up on the MoDo plagiarism scandal online, where all of those columnists and bloggers said everything I wanted to say.

So why not just do a little copy-and-paste, put it all together, and call it my own? Unless you frequent the sites I got my snippets from, I bet you wouldn’t have known any better if I hadn’t told you.

Feeling a little cheated? Upset that you came here to read original work, and instead got a Frankenstein mash-up of already published commentary? I felt the same way when I found out the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd weren’t hers at all.

Josh Marshall seems to be over it, posting on TPM that “I generally think we’re too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism.” That’s great.

But the point is, Maureen Dowd has been a Times columnist since 1995. She won a Pulitzer. With these distinctions come standards and responsibilities. A journalist of her caliber is expected to publish her own ideas, and when she decides someone else can say it better than she can, it’s her responsibility to give that person credit.

Even if that person is just a friend whose idea she wants to “weave” into her column.

The New York Times is passing this off as no big deal. It is a big deal, and if the Times hopes to live up to its own credo of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it needs to treat this as such.

If journalists like Dowd aren’t held accountable for plagiarism, then what can we expect from up-and-coming journalists who look to them as examples?

– Jessica Opoien is a sophomore in pre-journalism and mass communication from Marinette, Wisconsin.