Zakaria Plagiarism?

[citanon]

So, reading some articles on this Zakaria scandal brought me to this jewel. I find the opening sentence a hilariously well constructed example of acidic wit at its finest. The rest of the blurb isn't bad either.

Reality Check: TNR Names DC

FAREED ZAKARIA
Fareed Zakaria is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (“They May Not Want the Bomb,” was a story he did for Newsweek); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment. Most of Zakaria’s appeal is owed to the A-list aura that he likes to give off—“At the influential TED conference ...” began a recent piece in The New York Times. On his CNN show, he ingratiates himself to his high-powered guests. This mix of elitism and banality is unattractive. And so is this: “My friends all say I’m going to be Secretary of State,” Zakaria told New York magazine in 2003. “But I don’t see how that would be much different from the job I have now.” Zakaria later denied making those remarks.

[gunnut]

So he sticks his finger in the wind and then write a convoluted piece explaining his current popular position...

Sounds like a man without principle to me.

One reason I respect Dennis Kucinich is that he was against the Iraq War from the very beginning, when everyone on the left was for it.

[troung]

A left take, starts of with a class diatribe.

No an out and out Communist take on him. Hardly puts him in the middle.

Zaky was a goof.

[astralis]

NYT article. still not sure what happened here, though; was he running out of time and cribbing, or was it a screwup with research notes as he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/bu...edia-star.html

----

A Media Personality, Suffering a Blow to His Image, Ponders a Lesson

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: August 19, 2012

When Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the Beverly Hills entrepreneurs who founded POM Wonderful, wanted to host a dinner at their Aspen home in 2006 to talk about the Iraq war, they assembled a list of 22 A-list guests, including Queen Noor of Jordan, George Soros, the financier, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.

Leading the list of journalists was one of their favorite guests: Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-born Harvard Ph.D and foreign-policy specialist who had turned himself into an unlikely media star.

“When he speaks, I listen,” Ms. Resnick said last week. “I am just so thrilled that he exists, that there is someone like that.”

Since that evening, the Resnicks have watched Mr. Zakaria climb the media ladder to even greater heights — running Newsweek International, writing columns for Time magazine and The Washington Post, hosting “GPS,” his own program on CNN, and becoming one of the favorite dinner companions of the power elite.

But Mr. Zakaria’s career suffered an abrupt setback recently after bloggers discovered that his column of Aug. 20 for Time magazine had passages lifted almost entirely from an article by the historian Jill Lepore that appeared in The New Yorker in April.

Mr. Zakaria quickly apologized. But within minutes, Time had suspended him for a month and CNN, which had posted parts of the column on its Web site, removed the article and suspended him until further notice. Both began investigations of his work, as did The Post.

On Thursday afternoon, Time and CNN said they had completed their reviews, found no evidence of plagiarism and restored Mr. Zakaria to his demanding schedule. Just as quickly as his employers had questioned his credibility, they rallied around him.

“He’s one of the premier global intellectuals,” said Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time. “He will recover.”

Not that long ago, getting a column in Time would have been the pinnacle of a journalist’s career. But expectations and opportunities have grown in the last few years. Many writers now market themselves as separate brands, and their journalism works largely as a promotion for more lucrative endeavors like writing books and public speaking.

The problem, as Mr. Zakaria discovered, is that stain from any scandal can spread across platforms, threatening the image he had carefully built.

“This guy is his own brand,” said Jim Kelly, a former top editor at Time. “So when doing that, you have to be really careful at how you extend yourself. The American corporate landscape is littered with disastrous brand extensions.”

In an interview on Friday in his CNN office, Mr. Zakaria again apologized for what he had called “a terrible mistake.”

“This week has been very important because it has made me realize what is at the core of what I want to do,” Mr. Zakaria said. He said he wanted to “help people to think about this fast-moving world and do this through my work on TV and writing.”

He added: “Other things will have to go away. There’s got to be some stripping down.”

Even a stripped-down schedule for Mr. Zakaria seems ambitious. Mr. Zakaria said he works on his column ideas each weekend, reports them on Monday, writes on Tuesday and Wednesday and films his Sunday television program on Thursday.

Then there are the three books he wrote and one book he edited, the speeches, the Twitter postings, all while trying to spend mornings with his family. On a recent Friday he was trying to cook pancakes and French toast for his three children who range in age from 4 to 13.

Mr. Zakaria said he never had an assistant write a column in 25 years and that he began using a research assistant for his column only in the last year.

The mistake, he said, occurred when he confused the notes he had taken about Ms. Lepore’s article — he said he often writes his research in longhand — with notes taken from “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” by Adam Winkler (W.W. Norton, 2011), a copy of which was on his desk at his CNN office.

Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Knight-Wallace Fellows in journalism at the University of Michigan, said the episode reflects the economic realities underlying the media business, where magazines have become more dependent on single personalities.

“What happens in the media is the cult of personality,” he said. “The brands who have been forced to cut their staff have been forced to take on the brands of journalists.”

He compared what happened to Mr. Zakaria to some of the challenges that Dan Rather went through before his fall. Mr. Rather stepped down as anchor of “The CBS Evening News” after the network began an investigation into his report on “60 Minutes II” on President George W. Bush’s National Guard record. He was doing four jobs while his predecessor Walter Cronkite was able to focus on one, Mr. Eisendrath said. “As long as it’s cheaper to brand individual personalities than to build staff and bolster their brand, they will do it,” he said.

Friends say Mr. Zakaria, 48, has always been a multitasker — and an ambitious one. Boykin Curry, said that when they were Yale undergraduates and Mr. Zakaria ran the Yale Political Union, he set up trips to meet the vice president, Isaac Asimov and Andy Rooney. At the same time, Mr. Curry said, Mr. Zakaria always seemed so well read that “I figured he just never had to sleep.”

Gideon Rose, another close college friend of Mr. Zakaria’s and managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, said that Mr. Zakaria has always been efficient even with his private time. As he approached middle age, Mr. Zakaria grew more committed to an exercise routine of running and tennis and stuck to it. In 2011, he briefly separated from his wife, Paula Throckmorton, but said they were back together.

“I wish I had one-tenth of the energy and productivity he has,” Mr. Rose said. “I am much more normal than he is and therefore much less disciplined.”

After spending eight years as an editor at Foreign Policy magazine, Mr. Zakaria established his public reputation with a cover article for Newsweek in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks titled “Why They Hate Us.”

He publicly favored the Iraq invasion, although he argued for a multinational force and was critical of how the war was conducted. Moving to Time, he wrote “How to Restore the American Dream” a cover article and a CNN special.

Barrett Sheridan, a book researcher for Mr. Zakaria from 2008 to 2010, described his former boss as a “phenomenally fast and lucid writer” and said that he never knew Mr. Zakaria to have a ghostwriter.

Nisid Hajari, who worked with Mr. Zakaria at Newsweek from 2001 through 2010, said that, unlike some other columnists, Mr. Zakaria did his own research and writing. “I’ve edited other writers who seem to me to be overextended, and you can see it in their copy,” Mr. Hajari said. “Fareed was never like that.”

Current and former colleagues say that Mr. Zakaria has been very deliberate in the assignments he will take on. Mark Whitaker, managing editor of CNN Worldwide and former editor of Newsweek, said that Mr. Zakaria told him he had turned down suggestions that he start appearing daily on CNN.

Former colleagues at Newsweek International said he was involved in choosing covers and generating ideas but did little line editing and was more the public face of the magazine.

Now he says he plans to cut back work with groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Little Shakespeare Company and the Yale University governing board. He also says he plans to make fewer speeches.

“This has been a tough week, but it has also been clarifying,” he said. “You find out what matters to you in life, who your friends are.”

Ms. Resnick counts herself as one of his admirers. “It’s not his character to do these things,” she said about the plagiarism. “I think it’s a tempest in a teapot.”

[dalem]

Gee whillickers, I didn't know a man could type so much with a dude's johnson this deep in his throat.

Fareed Zakaria

Simultaneously, a huge cloud of excluded people, regular civilians and workaday journalists alike, can now respond on the Internet, many of them resentful that their voices go unheard while the Zakarias loom ever larger. So they pick over every word. For celebrity journalists, equally, a potent pressure has grown: the pressure to stay aloft at 40,000 feet, to stay prolific, and flawless. Zakaria must project omniscience to survive: so he writes short and long, on everything from al Qaeda to American gun control, the topic on which he was tripped up by the plagiarism McCarthyites. So he cribbed a little: he read a lot; took notes; things got jumbled. Is that worth a man’s career? I think not, and to his credit he thought not too. One admires him for fighting back, especially as those who called for his head were so pious, and yet so inhumane.

I admit I didn't really expect the "Sure, he's guilty of the charge leveled, but he's the Zak-man, so we have to let it slide." response.

-dale

[Double Edge]

I admit I didn't really expect the "Sure, he's guilty of the charge leveled, but he's the Zak-man, so we have to let it slide." response.

Why not ? he's admitted to it hasn't he.

Whether he should be banished in perpetuity is unclear.

[dalem]

Why not ? he's admitted to it hasn't he.

Whether he should be banished in perpetuity is unclear.

I'm not addressing Zakaria, I'm referencing the tone of the article. It's "Leave Brittany alone!" level.

-dale

[Double Edge]

He's BACK on the air

Head vs heart in U.S. election? – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs

A final personal note. As some of you know, two weeks ago, I wrote a column in Time Magazine and neglected to quote a New Yorker essay by Jill Lepore that I drew closely from.

I was not trying to pass the work off as my own. I prominently cited the book, "Gun Fight" by Adam Winkler that contained all the historical data that both Lepore and I wrote about it, but I absolutely should have quote or cited the New Yorker essay as well.

It was a mistake, but an honest one and I apologized. Time and CNN conducted exhaustive investigations looking at over 50 pages of research for that column as well as years of my commentary and found nothing to merit further action.

Time said it was entirely satisfied that this was an unintentional and isolated error. For my part, I just want to say again how sorry I am and let's get started.

Done!

[dalem]

Oops, he did it again.

Esquire: 'CNN Employs, Gives Airtime To, Defends a Plagiarist'

Couldn't resist, folks, just couldn't resist.

-dale

[troung]

Dude is a hack

CNN Does Not Get to Cherrypick the Rules of Journalism
The news is evolving. Old media is not evolving with it.

By Crushing Bort and Blippo Blappo on September 22, 2014
CNN Does Not Get to Cherrypick the Rules of Journalism - Esquire

Over the past month, two anonymous journalists have detailed several dozen examples of plagiarism by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in a 29-page report. CNN has taken no action and has referred back to a previous statement that said the company had “found nothing that gives us cause for concern.” Zakaria, who had been punished for plagiarism in the past, is in the clear.

The report highlights newly discovered instances of plagiarism, from a New Republic story in 1987 to examples after his initial punishment in 2012. One of the occurrences, for example, is a word-for-word recital of original reporting—basically the entire introduction—from a feature-length documentary.

This leads us to one of two conclusions:

1. CNN is afraid of the Wild West of Internet journalism, and what that might mean if old media outlets are subject to the same standards they project onto others.

2. Executives are uncomfortable with the names of these journalists being withheld (on Twitter, the reporters go by Crushing Bort and Blippo Blappo, comical aliases which have seemingly applied a low ceiling to their mainstream integrity) and the company would rather ignore it than pursue legitimate malfeasance.

Either way, this has become clear: CNN would rather employ, give airtime to, and defend a plagiarist whose resumé they find easy to personally explain and understand than someone who is doing actual journalism, but who might take more work to reach out to or understand.

It’s the fundamental journalistic problem of our time. Instead of embracing change, old media is again desperately afraid of—and even combative towards—its new reality. Having a PhD from Harvard University does not entitle one man to reappropriate the work of others countless times without punishment. Having that person on your staff also does not entitle a news organization to discredit the original reporting of others solely because those journalists wish to withhold their names.

This is a small case in the long run. Fareed Zakaria’s employment is of no grave threat to anything at all—especially now that we know his reports are rarely his own. But what happens when an unequivocal scoop with gravity and importance is broken by a man with the name “Crushing Bort” in the future? Does it first need to be vetted by the defenders of a plagiarist to gain credibility?

Traditional media powers cannot have it both ways: Do they want to participate in sometimes uncomfortable journalism, or do they want to work as an idea-generation outlet for academia?

We asked the writers of the 11,000 word report to answer that question in their own words.—Ben Collins, Esquire.com News Editor


“You don’t need an ethics course to know what you shouldn’t do.”

Fareed Zakaria uttered those words of wisdom in a 2012 commencement speech at Harvard. It was, as the Boston Globe’s Mary Carmichael noted at the time, the exact same words he’d uttered at Duke in a near-identical commencement speech weeks before. That August, Zakaria would face accusations of plagiarism following a Newsbusters report showing he’d lifted text from The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore in a TIME column. After an apology, a weeklong suspension from CNN and TIME, and some handwringing in a glowing New York Times profile, Zakaria returned to his role as Serious Journalist to the Stars.

Zakaria’s rehabilitation was enabled by a pledge from TIME, CNN, and the Washington Post—one unchecked by media reporters at the time—that they had reviewed his work and found his theft to be an “isolated incident.” We know now that pledge was never carried out with any serious effort, if at all. For the past month, we’ve posted dozens upon dozens of examples of Zakaria lifting material across almost every platform he’s touched, including his columns, a bestselling book, and a television program. Not only were the examples spread over three decades, but several of them took place after his 2012 scandal, including one late last month as we were writing our last post. Compounding the issue, a number contained significant errors due to Zakaria plagiarizing from sources that were out-of-date or wrong to begin with.

So why did we do it? Why didn’t anyone else? In the month that’s passed since our first post, no actual journalist has publicly followed up with further examples. And despite the scale and continuation of the plagiarism, the response from Zakaria and his bosses have been striking in their lack of honesty or any sense of obligation to viewers and readers. CNN, TIME, and the Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt were quick to give Zakaria their wholehearted support, while Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Atlantic Media and publisher W.W. Norton have not even replied to requests by Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon for comment. After being confronted with Zakaria’s most recent and largest cache of theft last week, CNN declined to comment to Politico’s Dylan Byers and instead pointed him to the statement it had written weeks earlier, saying it “found nothing that gives us cause for concern” in Zakaria’s work. And following weeks of silence on the issue, CNN’s media reporter Brian Stelter tweeted Sunday that he was “pursuing the story” and “trying to get an interview” with Zakaria.

That the network’s own media reporter would have to “try” to get a quote from one of its own hosts over widely-documented plagiarism says everything about the dynamic at play here. Why would CNN defer to Zakaria on answering for why he plagiarized on their network? And what could he possibly say in his defense? That stealing material is defensible if the people who publicize it go by names that sound like third-rate Pokemon? Reporters have claimed as much publicly and in requests for interviews. They’ve told us that without going public, we can’t expect Zakaria to be held to account.

That claim, frankly, is bullshit. First, let’s be honest about needing names to verify someone else’s wrongdoing. Nothing about who we are will give readers a deeper insight into the wide span of plagiarism committed by Fareed Zakaria, and nothing about them gives his massive theft a pass. Our names would be an issue if our work couldn’t be checked. But everything we’ve posted is publically available information that can be verified independently by anyone with an Internet connection. There were no inside sources, disgruntled employees, or discarded scripts recovered from garbage cans. There was no plagiarism software used here, either. Finding examples of Zakaria’s plagiarism is as easy as a simple combination of Google and asking yourself common-sense questions like “would Fareed Zakaria really have reason to know this much about the growing rates of shampooing licenses?”

Second, reporters, media experts, and journalism professors have corroborated our findings. Byers outright called Zakaria a plagiarist last week in an article citing the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics and The Poynter Institute’s VP for academic programs. LSU’s Steve Buttry has called it “high-level plagiarism.” So even if we live in a world where our journalism requires charges of plagiarism to be verified by mainstream reporters and experts, that box has been checked.

Third, even BuzzFeed eventually took action when we pointed out less than a dozen examples of plagiarism by Benny Johnson. Why should CNN—which literally bills itself as “The Most Trusted Name In News”—be able to ignore what BuzzFeed wouldn’t? Why would a press corps so eager to discuss plagiarism when it involves a relatively unknown social media editor fall largely silent on when it's committed from one of the biggest names in journalism? If Fareed Zakaria can get away with plagiarism because we don’t name ourselves, we’re not the ones who look bad: reporters are.

We have more examples of Zakaria’s plagiarism, but releasing them won’t tell us what we already know: Zakaria’s value to CNN and his other employers outweighs their commitment to journalistic integrity. He’s part of their brand. The network has already conceded his responsibility for lifting material unattributed, because if someone other than Zakaria had been responsible, they would have been publicly canned by now and CNN would be patting itself on the back for its high standards. That’s exactly what happened this May, when one of the network’s international news editors was fired for “multiple instances of plagiarism.” In its statement announcing her firing, CNN trumpeted its standards of “trust, integrity, and simply giving credit where it’s due.”

But Fareed Zakaria GPS is a Peabody-winning show that nabs interviews with some of the world’s biggest names. Just this week, Zakaria interviewed both President Clinton and Indian PM Narendra Modi. In the second quarter of 2014, GPS ranked #2 in both total viewership and the crucial 25-54 demographic rating. The show’s success stands in contrast to the network’s otherwise rough summer, with its reboot of Crossfire on “extended hiatus” and president Jeff Zucker ominously promising his employees that they will have to “do less and have to do it with less.” Admitting that the Worldwide Leader In News had failed to do basic due diligence in monitoring Zakaria’s work—and then stood firmly behind him in the face of mounting evidence of wrongdoing—is the last thing CNN needs, credibility be damned.

What CNN and other outlets fail to consider is the inevitability of another copy-and-paste scandal down the road. It might even be reported by an actual news outlet and not easily-forgotten anonymous bloggers. How that fallout differs from the precedent set by Fareed Zakaria will be a story to watch. As the Washington Post’s then-executive editor Marcus Brauchli said in 2011 in response to one of his reporters’ stealing work from the Arizona Republic, “There are no mitigating circumstances for plagiarism.” If only that was true.

[SteveDaPirate]

I really like the idea of a show like GPS that discusses world events and high level policy as opposed to the typical Democrat vs Republican circle jerk. Hopefully CNN can find a better host.

[dalem]

Ahh, the Plagiarizer Bunny keeps thumping on.

Media Stands By Serial Plagiarist Fareed Zakaria Despite Wave of New Charges

-dale

[troung]

Can't even steal a good idea.

[Double Edge]

Been a while since i posted in this thread but i've moved on from his show. There are so many specialist talks out nowadays on youtube that its impossible to cover topics with the attention they deserve in such a short format. GPS is good for people who have a casual interest but not more.