Maureen Dowd

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Maureen Dowd
Born	January 14, 1952 (1952-01-14) (age 57) Washington, D.C.
Education	B.A. in English
Occupation	Columnist
Notable credit(s)	Pulitzer Prize

Maureen Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times.^[1][2] She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined as a metropolitan reporter.^[1][2] In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.^[1][3]

Dowd was born in Washington, D.C.,^[1][2] the youngest of five children, where her father (who was born in County Clare in Ireland) worked as a Washington D.C. police inspector.^[4]

Contents 1 Career 2 Writing style 3 Frequent subject matter 3.1 Al Gore 4 Criticism 4.1 Plagiarism controversy 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Career

In 1973, Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.^[1][2] She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer.^[1][2] When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time.^[1][2] In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter.^[1][2] She began serving as correspondent in The Times Washington bureau in 1986.^[1][2] In 1991, Dowd received a Breakthrough Award from Columbia University.^[2] In 1992, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting,^[2] and in 1994 she won a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications.^[2][5]

Dowd became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995;^[1][2] she replaced Anna Quindlen,^[4] who left to become a full-time novelist.^[6] Dowd was named a Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine in 1996,^[2] and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.^[1] She won The Damon Runyon Award for outstanding contributions to journalism in 2000,^[7] and became the first Mary Alice Davis Lectureship speaker (sponsored by the School of Journalism and the Center for American History) at The University of Texas at Austin in 2005.^[8] She refers to her New York Times colleague, Tom Friedman as her "office husband" or "Mr. Solar."^[9]

[edit] Writing style

Dowd's columns are distinguished by an acerbic, often polemical writing style.^[10] Her columns often display a critical and irreverent attitude towards powerful figures such as former President George W. Bush, former President Bill Clinton, and Pope Benedict XVI.^{[citation needed]} Dowd sometimes refers to Bush as "W.", and former Vice President Dick Cheney as "Big Time."^[11] She has called President George H. W. Bush, whom she covered as Times White House Correspondent, "41";^{[12][unreliable source?]} she also frequently refers to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "I'm-a-Dinner-Jacket."^{[citation needed]} Her columns have been described as letters to her mother, and in a [1] interview, Dowd said, "she is in my head in the sense that I want to inform and amuse the reader.^[13]"

Dowd often catalogs the popular culture influences of public figures she profiles as well;^[10] in a Times video debate, she said of the North Korean government: "...you could look at a movie like Mean Girls and figure out the way these North Koreans are reacting; you know it's like high school girls with nuclear weapons—they just want some attention from us, you know?"^[14]

[edit] Frequent subject matter

[edit] Al Gore

In the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, Dowd took a consistently hard position against Democratic candidate Al Gore. She wrote that "Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct that he's practically lactating."^[15] Joe Conason writes in Salon.com that:

Particularly catty and revealing is a quote from a 1999 column in which she suggested that Gore's environmentalism raised questions about his masculinity. But that was simply one episode among dozens that continued well after the 2000 election cycle. When the former vice president dared to voice his anger about the bloody debacle in Iraq two years ago, the Times columnist sweetly lumped him in with "the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party." He had to be nuts to be upset about the lies that led us into war, didn't he?^[16]

Media Matters for America criticized Dowd for her constant criticism of Gore and published a compilation of her previous takes on him.^[17] Yet in a Fresh Dialogues interview, she said, "I was just teasing him a little bit because he was so earnest and he could be a little righteous and self important. That’s not always the most effective way to communicate your ideas, even if the ideas themselves are right. I mean, certainly his ideas were right but he himself was - sometimes - a pompous messenger for them." ^[18]

[edit] Criticism

Shortly after she won her Pulitzer, a New York Press article analyzed Dowd's columns and concluded that Dowd appears to do little reporting and tends to "dumb down" her subject matter by viewing it through the lens of pop culture.^[19] A 2002 article in The Weekly Standard explored Dowd's alleged narcissism and tendency to reduce "political phenomena ... to caricatures of the personalities involved."^[20]

In 2003, Dowd was accused by James Taranto of being intentionally misleading --- inserting ellipses, for instance, to change a quotation's intended meaning.^[21]

She has repeatedly been criticized by Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler for trivializing and making baseless accusations about Democratic politicians. For example, on January 31, 2007, the Howler criticized her for trivializing the campaigns of female politicians, and in particular that of Hillary Clinton.^[22] In 2007, Dowd was accused by National Journal writer Jonathan Rauch as being a "villain of journalism" in an interview with the magazine Reason; Rauch added that his criticism was not personal and that he considered Dowd "very good at what she does."^[23] Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, admitted: "I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, [Dowd] went over the top this election season."^[24] Fellow Times op-ed columnist and former editorial page editor Gail Collins came to Dowd's defense in a subsequent public letter to Hoyt.^[25]

Film critic David Denby devotes an entire chapter to Dowd in his 2009 book Snark, and identifies her as one of the foremost practitioners of snark. He writes: "[S]he has not - as far as I can tell - a single political idea in her head. Not one...She writes as if personality, appearance, and attitude were the only things that mattered. For her, politics is a stupid, despair-inducing entertainment, a tale told by an idiot signifying vanity. Despite all her larks and inventions, she's essentially sour and without hope."^[26]

[edit] Plagiarism controversy

Talking Points Memo blogger "thejoshuablog" found a paragraph in Dowd's May 17, 2009 Times column that was extremely similar to one in a May 14 blog post by TPM editor Josh Marshall, and accused her of plagiarism.^[27] Dowd, already known for finding similarities between an August 1987 speech by Joe Biden and an earlier one by British politician Neil Kinnock, said that the virtually identical paragraph was simply "a line" told to her by a friend, and that she had never read the blog.^[28][29] She left unclear whether the "line" came from a verbal or written exchange with the anonymous friend, and did not explain how the paragraph wound up copied with the exception of two words in the original blog post. Since then, Dowd's column has been updated with a correction that references Marshall and notes the lack of proper attribution in the original piece.^[27] Later, Clark Hoyt also criticized Dowd, saying "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."^[30]

[edit] Bibliography

• Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (Putnam, 2004, ISBN 0-399-15258-X)
• Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (Putnam, 2005, ISBN 0-399-15332-2)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Maureen Dowd

• Dowd's columns at The New York Times
• Dowd participates in an extended political discussion with Andrew Rosenthal, David Brooks and Frank Rich, The New York Times video, July 17, 2006
• Maureen Dowd at the Internet Movie Database