Maureen Dowd
Maureen Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a columnist for The New York Times and an author. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Dowd was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of five children in a Catholic family where her father worked as a police officer.
Career
In 1973, Dowd received a B.A. in English Literature from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. 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. When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time magazine. In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter. She began serving as correspondent in The Times Washington bureau in 1986. In 1991, Dowd received a Breakthrough Award from Columbia University. In 1992, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting, and in 1994 she won a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications. In 1995, Dowd replaced opinion columnist Anna Quindlen, who went to work at Newsweek magazine. Dowd was named a Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine in 1996. She was the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. In 2000, she won the Damon Runyon award for outstanding contributions to journalism. In 2005, she was awarded the Mary Alice Davis Lectureship award from the College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin.
Most of Dowd's online columns are now only available through the subscriber-only TimesSelect program.
Writing style
Dowd's columns are distinguished by a witty, incisive, acerbic writing style. Her columns often display a marked irreverence for powerful figures such as President George W. Bush, former President Bill Clinton, and Pope Benedict XVI. For example, Dowd sometimes refers to President Bush as "W" or more recently "Bubble-Boy", Vice President Cheney as "Vice" and Donald Rumsfeld as "Rummy".
Around Christmas, Dowd does not write her column; rather, she lets her conservative brother write it.
Criticism
Dowd was accused by James Taranto of inserting ellipses to change a quote's intended meaning and thereafter the idiom "dowdify" was sometimes used by conservative bloggers as a derogatory term to describe willful misinterpretation of a quote. [1][2]
Most recently Dowd was accused of misusing or misinterpreting sociological research and using little more than anecdotal evidence in support of her claim in "Are men necessary?". See a review article [3] by Katie Roiphe in Slate magazine and a response [4] in Salon magazine. See also Christina Hoff Sommers's take on it in the National Review [5] , and the article by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post [6].
Bibliography
- Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (Putnam, 2004) ISBN 039915258X
- Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (Putnam, 2005) ISBN 0399153322
References
- New York Times columns.
- "The New York Times dowdified 'reporting'" by Gerard Jackson, BrookesNews.Com, June 7, 2003
- "The Redhead and the Gray Lady" by Ariel Levy, New York Magazine, November 7, 2005
- BookNotes: "Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk" by Maureen Dowd, video and transcript, August 8, 2004
- Maureen Dowd at IMDb