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Tags: Fareed Zakaria | plagiarism | CNN | Washington Post | Politico

CNN's Fareed Zakaria Under Fire for Plagiarism

By    |   Thursday, 18 September 2014 12:22 PM EDT

CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria has recently been accused of plagiarism by two separate media watchdogs, and other journalism ethics experts are joining the fray, Politico reported.

A report by Our Bad Media outlines 12 examples of alleged plagiarism on CNN. In one instance, Zakaria failed to cite the source when he repeated an introduction to a Dutch documentary about Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky without attributing it, according to Politico. The report also said he took facts and wording from a 2011 Economist article, also without attribution.

In a review of multiple reports citing at least three dozen examples of copied passages and unattributed material, Politico also found hard evidence that Zakaria plagiarized.

"Most of the examples provided and analyzed by the bloggers 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," Robert Drechsel, the James E. Burgess chair and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Politico.

"It falls within what I would consider plagiarism. Other examples cited by the bloggers do appear to be verbatim."

Another expert agreed.

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"It seems obvious that Fareed was overly reliant on his source material," Kelly McBride, vice president for academic programs at The Poynter Institute, told Politico. "It's plagiarism. Low-level. But plagiarism."

Zakaria has previously denied accusations by the media watchdogs, telling Politico, "These are all facts, not someone else's writing or opinions or expressions," he wrote. He also said most of the examples that were flagged were "cases in my writing where I have cited a statistic that also appeared somewhere else," suggesting that he had used information that was widely publicly available.

In 2012, Zakaria had been suspended from CNN, Time, and the Post on accusations of plagiarism but not dismissed, having explained it as "a mistake."

CNN and The Washington Post have also dismissed the Our Bad Media report.

A CNN spokesman said the network "found nothing that gives us cause for concern," according to Politico. And the Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, said "it was so far from a case of plagiarism that it made me question the entire enterprise," Politico reported.


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CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria has recently been accused of plagiarism by two separate media watchdogs, and other journalism ethics experts are joining the fray, Politico reported.
Fareed Zakaria, plagiarism, CNN, Washington Post, Politico
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2014-22-18
Thursday, 18 September 2014 12:22 PM
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