From Padma Bhushan in January 2010 to plagiarism in August 2012, CNN host and Time editor-at-large Fareed Zakaria has indeed come a long-winded way. The 48-year-old Zakaria’s post-New Yorker world could well be said to have begun with the word “unintelligent”, the last word of the last sentence in his Time piece ‘The Case for Gun Control’, a portion of which was, well, stolen from a New Yorker article in April by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was quick to confess, saying: “Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23 issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”
Zakaria has been suspended by both media organisations, Time saying what he did “violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed’s column for a month, pending further review.”
It wasn’t the first time. Ask Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for the Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Zakaria was a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International for a decade, from 2000 to 2010. In a May 2009 piece in the Atlantic headlined ‘The New Newsweek, Now With Less Reporting’, Goldberg accused Zakaria of stealing quotes from his columns, beginning by saying: “I think Fareed Zakaria just friended me. But it is the friendship that dare not speak my name.” Nailing two specific instances of thinly-disguised theft, Goldberg ended his column by saying: “The question is, How do I reciprocate this new friendship? By stealing his shit? Maybe Goldblog readers could help: Are there any good quotes from Zakaria’s interviews with world leaders that I could lift for the Atlantic?”
And then there were the similar commencement addresses Zakaria recently delivered to graduating classes at Duke University first and Harvard later.
- Sunday Standard