Time, CNN suspend Fareed Zakaria for apparent plagiarism

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Allahpundit @ Hot Air:

Cam Edwards and Newsbusters caught him in the act; follow the link to read the offending passage from his new gun-control column side by side with a similar paragraph in a gun-control piece published in April by “The New Yorker.” Not the first time that Zakaria’s been accused of pinching stuff, either. The Atlantic remembers that Jeffrey Goldberg accused him of lifting quotes from Goldberg’s own interviews with Israeli officials. And just this afternoon, Michael Moynihan — who caught The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer making up Bob Dylan quotes just two weeks ago — noticed that a sentence in Zakaria’s column on China in the May edition of Time reads a lot like a sentence from a Time story on China published in 1968. If he were a lesser name, he’d probably already have been canned. As it is, I wonder how many lucky Time staffers will end up on the inevitable task force charged with going through his old stuff to see just how bad the problem is.

Daniel Halper at the Standard already has the appropriate alternate headline here, so I’ll simply pose a plaintive question instead: Where will we get our middlebrow liberal conventional wisdom on policy now? Via the Atlantic, Zakaria’s formal apology:

“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 23rd 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.”

Time’s suspended him for a month, no doubt to give their researchers time to check his back catalog. CNN, meanwhile, has suspended him indefinitely because — ta da — he wrote a blog post on their site on the same subject that also included unattributed excerpts. Assuming that this is in fact deliberate plagiarism and not just some bizarre editing mishap or whatever (Zakaria’s apology is a bit ambiguous), I have no earthly idea why anyone would persist in this behavior in the age of Google even if they’ve otherwise made peace with the idea of behaving unethically.

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Fareed Zakaria has been both an adviser and mouthpiece for Obama ever since the 2008 election.

Iowahawk had the best tweet: “I’m not sure what’s more shocking – that Zakaria plagiarized or that there’s still a Time Magazine.”

I cant decide which is worse Zakaria or Christian Amanpour, she is the biggest shill for the WH and more anti Israel than Zakaria and she is continually given shows even with crap ratings.