MoDowd’s Dateline Foul-Up

Man. Maureen Dowd, we love you, but the whole false datelines thing brings us down a little.

Basically, an article published on January 9th was datelined in Derry, NH. Except… Dowd was in Jerusalem then, Talking Points Memo reports:

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.

Times policy on datelines requires only that the reporter spend some time in the place identified; they are not required to file their piece from the place. Plus… the fact that Dowd’s assistant allegedly stayed in New Hampshire the whole time does not hurt things either.

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