Death by a thousand cut-and-pastes

Maureen Dowd is the latest journalistic big gun to be caught using someone else's prose and pretending it's hers. Dowd used about 40 words from an online source in a column that appeared yesterday in the New York Times. This article from Slate helpfully analyzes the infraction, and how Dowd has responded. This is clearly a teachable moment, as journalism students everywhere have been admonished for years to never do what Dowd has done--to her public and personal embarrassment. Having this bad behavior outed is perhaps the only thing that keeps it from becoming rampant, considering the ease with which anyone can cut-and-paste someone else's creative thought.