Controversy Over Maureen Dowd's New Hampshire Dateline Goes International!
January 21, 2008 -- 9:58 AM EST // //

I missed this from a few days ago, but it's too much fun not to flag. It seems the controversy over Maureen Dowd's column -- which led readers to believe that she'd been at Hillary's New Hampshire victory party, talking to voters, when in fact she was in Jerusalem -- has now gone international.

Jerusalem Post columnist Calev Ben-David has now weighed in on the whole affair in a column confirming that he'd seen Dowd in Jerusalem. He comes down squarely against The Times:

Last week, I dropped by the press room at the Dan Panorama Hotel, set up to accommodate the White House reporters traveling with US President George W. Bush. An old friend who works in Washington pointed out, among the journalists present, the noted New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, who sat there busily typing away.

I expressed surprise at seeing her here in Jerusalem - especially since just an hour earlier I had read her latest piece on the New Hampshire primary, which described firsthand the scene just the previous night at Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters, and was datelined Derry, N.H.

I'm not the only one who noticed the discrepancy - within hours, the blogosphere was buzzing about Dowd's miraculous ability to be in two places at once. The Times sprang to her defense, pointing out she had been in Derry earlier in the week, had used an assistant to provide the color at the Clinton HQ, and brushed off her use of a New Hampshire dateline.

"This is a complete invention, this controversy," Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal told The New York Observer, adding: "Datelines are kind of an anachronism. It's a little bit of an affectation."

If that's the case, though, why use a dateline at all, especially on a column where it's not really necessary? The problem with Dowd's piece was not that she wrote it in Jerusalem, but that it was deliberately written and presented in a manner to deceive the reader into believing that she had been present in New Hampshire on primary night.

I don't know if this was deliberate deception, and this columnist is using the episode primarily to bash the "liberal" Times. But the basic point stands: Because of the combination of the dateline and the uncredited reporting, readers came away believing that Dowd was in New Hampshire on the night of Hillary's victory party, taking the measure of voters, when she wasn't.

At this point, people all across the political spectrum have come down against The Times on this one. Indeed, I'm not sure who's defending the paper, aside from a handful of its editors and reporters.

The comments section is temporarily disabled and is currently undergoing repair. This blog's homepage is here.

---

---