Time's Douche Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizes Passage, & Apologizes; But He's Done It Before

Just a slightly-reworded lift, with the precise structure and organization of the paragraph stolen without attribution.

And structure and organization is the tough part, in case anyone didn't know that; anyone can just re-word anything. Hell, second-graders just re-word stuff from the encyclopedia all the time. We let them do that, because 1, they're second graders, and 2, usually they're honest enough to say "Encyclopedia Britannica says..."

But Fareed is not in second grade, and he did not give credit to the writer he stole from.

And as Newsbusters points out, he's been accused before by Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg of stealing quotes from interviews Goldberg conducted and writing them up to sound like Zakaria conducted them.

Prediction: We're going to find out this is worse. There is no reason at all to be grudging about giving credit, unless you are bringing so little to the table you have to deny credit, in order to retain any for yourself.

Easiest thing in the world to throw credit to the deserving party. I just cannot think of any sound reason to refuse to do so.

Zakaria now says he apologizes "unreservedly" to the writer he swiped from, but I assume he's going to follow that up with a round of excuses. "Inadvertent editing error" and such. I think we're going to find out there are more reservations to that "unreserved" apology than word choice would currently imply.

Update: One Month Suspension, Pending Further Review. Zakaria calls it "serious lapse" and a "terrible mistake."

From where I sit those are two different things. A "mistake" could still be an "inadvertent editing error," whereas a "lapse" suggests to me culpability.

So is he confessing culpability, or is he playing the Inadvertent Editing Error card?

posted by Ace at 04:35 PM

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