NYT public editor Clark Hoyt had to review the firefighting and preventative measures on three ethical flare-ups at his employer's newspaper.

I'll focus on the one involving Mo Dowd, as I've blogged about it before:

Last Sunday, Dowd’s column on Dick Cheney and torture picked up a paragraph, with one minor word change, from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, without identifying the source. Another blogger noticed, and the Internet was soon aflame with charges of plagiarism.

Dowd said she had not read Marshall’s Web post, but was talking with a friend who suggested the wording without telling her where it came from. An attribution was added to the column online, and The Times ran a correction the next day.

Her explanation was unconvincing to some. How could a friend — whom Dowd has not identified — repeat verbatim a 42-word paragraph? I heard from readers demanding that Dowd be fired.

Dowd told me the passage in question was part of an e-mail conversation with her friend. She noted that she had credited two other bloggers for other information in the column, so there was no reason to intentionally slight Marshall.

Marshall posted his view: “We’re too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism.” He said he didn’t think Dowd acted intentionally, and the correction was “pretty much the end of it.”

I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said journalists collaborate and take feeds from each other all the time. That is true with news articles, but readers have a right to expect that even if an opinion columnist like Dowd tosses around ideas with a friend, her column will be her own words. If the words are not hers, she must give credit.

The key question with Dowd wasn't that she was tossing around ideas with a friend. It's that she reproduced a passage almost verbatim. It turned out that the passage had its origins with Marshall of TPM.

One question for Hoyt: Did he personally see this email? It's not clear from his above words.

And was there any investigation by the NYT to determine the email's veracity?

The initial story from Dowd seemingly said the lifting came about as a result of her conversation with a friend, not an email exchange.

Given some of the horrendous ethical problems the NYT has brought upon itself in the recent past, I would hope the NYT is not trying to brush this Dowd matter under the rug to protect a marquee columnist.

On the offence itself, I would say there are differing levels of culpability for inadvertent and deliberate plagiarism.

If someone has a strong ethical track record and loses track of one passage of information one time in their career -- easily done, given the easily forwarded nature of digitized information -- that does not justify termination of their employment.

If a pattern of plagiarism emerges, that tilts the scale.

And if someone is busted for and act of apparent plagiarism and then misleads about it, that should put them in a very sticky wicket.