Joan Didion is taken out to the woodshed by some for her essay on the case of Teresa Schiavo, published in June in the New York Review of Books.

One critic, a doctor who she referred to in the essay, claims he was taken out of context; that Didion merely lifted what he had told the New York Times in an earlier article without talking to him herself.

Didion responds by saying, yes, she took his statement out of a New York Times article, but that he wasn't quoted out of context.

Here's the passage from her original essay referring to the doctor, Joseph Fins:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging in particular has enabled neuroscientists to detect brain activity in patients previously diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative states. According to Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division at New York Presbyterian Hospital–Weill Cornell Medical Center, one study suggested that as many as 30 percent of vegetative patients studied were in fact minimally conscious. On the basis of the ninety minutes Dr. Cheshire spent with Theresa Schiavo, he suggested that she could well be found to fit the more recent "minimally conscious" diagnosis. He observed that she held his gaze for about thirty seconds, smiled when she heard familiar voices or piano music, and seemed in the changing pitch of her vocalization to be communicating "emotional thought within her brain." Neurologists who had previously examined her described such responses as reflexive.

Why is Joan Didion using New York Times reporting without crediting the New York Times? To be fair, she credits the New York Times and other publications elsewhere in the piece for other information, but attributes nothing about Fins' remarks to the paper.

As Fins asks in his letter to the New York Review of Books,"Does this uncited point suggest that Ms. Didion and I had a conversation?"

Well...yes.

If a New York Times reporter used material from another publication, without crediting it, what would be the result? Oh, wait. Never mind.