[9][5] Dowd entered journalism in 1974 as a dictationist for the Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer.

[9][5] In 1987, after being tipped off by Jeffrey Lord, she broke the story that Delaware Senator Joe Biden had plagiarized several speeches from other politicians.

[5] In 1992, she became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting,[5] and in 1994 she won a Matrix Award from the New York Association for Women in Communications.

[15] Dowd's columns have been described as letters to her mother, whom friends credit as "the source, the fountain of Maureen's humor and her Irish sensibilities and her intellectual take.

[17] Her columns display a critical and irreverent attitude towards powerful, mostly political, figures such as former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

[16]In January 2014, Dowd recounted that after eating about one-fourth of a cannabis-infused chocolate bar while touring the legalized recreational cannabis industry,[22] she was later told she should have only eaten one-sixteenth[23][24]—but that this had not been in the instructions on the label.

[28] On March 4, 2014, Dowd published a column about the dominance of men in the film industry in which she quoted Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

BuzzFeed said the column "painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication.

On December 12, 2014, Times public editor Margaret Sullivan concluded, "While the tone of the email exchanges is undeniably gushy, I don't think Ms. Dowd did anything unethical here.

[41][42][43][40] During the 2008 Democratic primary, Dowd published an article titled "Can Hillary Clinton Cry Herself Back to the White House?

[45][46] According to then-public editor of The New York Times Clark Hoyt, Dowd's columns about Clinton were "loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband".

[47] During the 2016 presidential election, Dowd penned a New York Times op-ed, titled "Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk".

[2] She argued that Donald Trump held dovish foreign policy beliefs, citing his purported opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

[48][49][50][51] In 2018, Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, wrote that Trump's foreign policy was clearly hawkish and stated, "Yes, I'm extremely angry.

[2][52][53] During the 2020 presidential election, Dowd wrote a column about Geraldine Ferraro, which initially—and incorrectly—stated that the last time a man and a woman ran on the Democratic ticket was the Mondale–Ferraro ticket, which led Clinton to joke that "either Tim Kaine and [she] had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column again".