CNN host Fareed Zakaria is fending off new charges of plagiarism, with some publications putting warning statements on his work,
The Daily Beast reports.
Zakaria, (a sometimes foreign affairs adviser to President Barack Obama) has come under fire from two contributors to a blog called "Our Bad Media." The pair, who say they blog as a hobby, have spent three months poring over Zakaria’s writings, and say they have found numerous instances of plagiarism.
In recent days, a number of major media outlets Zakaria has written for have criticized him and placed warnings on his archived work. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt (who had strongly defended Zakaria against plagiarism charges in the past) said that the Post would probably place warnings on five Zakaria columns published before August 2012 and called his errors "unfair to readers and to the original sources."
Editors at Slate magazine criticized a February 1998 Zakaria column about the martini, saying it "does not meet Slate’s editorial standards, having failed to properly attribute quotations and information drawn from Max Rudin’s History of the Martini."
Last Friday, Newsweek (where Zakaria was editor of the magazine’s international edition for many years) identified seven articles dating back to the fall of 2001 that do not "meet editorial standards" and "borrow extensively" from the work of other writers "without proper attribution."
CNN (which suspended Zakaria two years ago for plagiarism) appears, however, to have doubled down in support of Zakaria. The Daily Beast reports that CNN responded to the new plagiarism allegations against him by recycling an earlier statement declaring that it "has the highest confidence in the excellence and integrity of Fareed Zakaria’s work."
In September,
Politico reported finding its own evidence that Zakaria plagiarized. The publication asked two prominent journalism professors to independently review some of the specific allegations of plagiarism against him.
Most of the examples "seem to fall into the realm of what is now being called 'patch writing' — using material generated by someone else, without attribution, but rewritten slightly so one cannot call it verbatim copying," said Robert Drechsel, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The writing "falls within what I would consider plagiarism," he added.
Zakaria "was overly reliant on his source material," said Kelly McBride, vice president for academic programs at the Poynter Institute.
"It’s plagiarism. Low-level. But plagiarism," McBride added.
In 2012, Zakaria was suspended from Time and CNN after he admitted plagiarizing from a New Yorker article on gun control,
according to Fox News.
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