Dowd's Hillary Hit -- Dateline Jerusalem?
January 10, 2008 -- 2:00 PM EST // //
Updated below.
It's election eve. Do you know where your favorite prestige columnist is?
Maureen Dowd weighed in with a column yesterday that made a big splash, pissed off lots of people, and became part of the political conversation about Hillary's New Hampshire victory. The column -- called "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back To White House"? -- was datelined "Derry, N.H."
The column struck some people as taking a holier-than-thou tone to Dowd nemesis Hillary. But you don't know the half of it. The column, apparently, was filed from half a world away -- from Jerusalem.
The piece reads as if Dowd was on the scene at Hillary's victory party, interviewing voters reacting to her win. But it turns out Dowd couldn't have been at the party at all -- instead, she'd already jetted half way around the world to cover the President's Middle East trip, I'm told. An eyewitness tells TPM that on Tuesday night he spied Dowd typing away at the reporters' media filing center in Jerusalem's Dan Panorama hotel.
A Times spokesperson tells me there's no dateline issue here at all -- but more on that in a sec. First, take a look at what Dowd's New Hampshire-datelined column says:
At Hillary’s victory party in Manchester, Carolyn Marwick, 65, said Hillary showed she was human at the cafe. “I think she’s really tired. She’s been under a lot more scrutiny than the other candidates — how she dresses, how she laughs.”If Dowd was nearly 6,000 miles away from these people on Tuesday night, how did the quotes get into her column? A reporter I know tells me that Dowd's assistant was floating around at the Hillary victory party that night. So it seems almost certain that Dowd's assistant did the reporting for her. But there's no other byline on the piece.Her son, David, 35, an actor, said he also “got choked up” when he saw Hillary get choked up. He echoed Hillary’s talking points on the likability issue. “It’s not ‘American Idol.’ You have to vote smart.”
Olivia Cooper, 41, of Concord said, “When you think you’re not going to make it, it’s heart-wrenching when you want something so much.”
Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily on Dowd. It appears to be standard practice at The Times. Columnists have assistants who do reporting for them but don't get any credit. Life is good if you're a top-shelf political columnist.
Dowd did spend some time in New Hampshire, it turns out. Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis confirmed to me that Dowd had gone to Jerusalem, noting that Dowd had been in New Hampshire before heading abroad. What about that "Derry, N.H." dateline? Not an issue, Mathis says. Times dateline policy dictates that the reporter spend some time in the place identified, and doesn't require the reporter to be there all the time or file the piece from that location.
The thing is, anyone reading this piece would assume that Dowd had hoofed it to the victory party to lament Hillary's victory firsthand. Instead, she was apparently filing this New Hampshire-datelined piece from Jerusalem. Times policy may say this is okay, but it seems like a bit more clarity couldn't hurt -- if only because it would prevent folks from thinking Dowd was at the party and had done the work of talking to the voters she quoted, when neither of these things apparently happened.
"If she was in Jerusalem, and the dateline says New Hampshire and there's local color from New Hampshire, there's an issue," journalism prof Jay Rosen told me. "There may not be any violation, but it's fair to ask questions about these kinds of practices."
Why not stick around for the whole story? And anyway, even if there's more pressing news that demanded her attention, a campaign piece datelined Jerusalem would not have lacked for dash and flair.
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