Fresh plagiarism charges: Is this the end of Fareed Zakaria?

CNN columnist and Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria, is facing fresh charges of plagiarism. The journalist, who hosts CNN’s foreign affairs show, has faced plagiarism charges in 2012  and in August this year . The two bloggers @blippoblappo and @crushingbort who run Our Bad Media have now bought out 24 new instances where Zakaria copied both in columns and on also on his show. You can read their full blogpost here. It is evident from the detail into which these two have gone that they take their work seriously. Also the meticulous nature of research shows that once again Zakaria has been caught red-handed. The recent blogpost shows that Zakaria not only stole numbers from the Time Magazine, CNN and The Washington Post as the previous post had highlighted, but also from other well-established publications like The Economist, New York Times,  Al-Jazeera, Financial Times, BBC, Reuters, Associated Press. And  it is a wide list. In addition to this there’s also stolen numbers from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest.  The authors have pointed out how one of the introductions for one of Zakaria’s show on a Russian lawyer Sergei Magnistky was lifted word by word from an 2011-documentary on the same lawyer by Dutch filmmakers Hans Hermans and Martin Maat. The bloggers have even sliced together the original documentary with clippings from Zakaria’s show which brings forth the extent of plagiarism. Earlier when they had published details about Zakaria’s plagiarism, the India-American author had defended himself and said that he had not re-written other people’s opinions but just used the data.  Zakaria had written his blog: “These are all facts, not someone else’s writing or opinions or expressions. For example, in one column, I note that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan. The bloggers point out that this is also in Wikipedia’s Reagan entry. But it is also in hundreds of other articles, studies, and reports.” He had also added that when data is concerned and if it is government data, he doesn’t need to cite a source but “if it is a study or survey produced by a think tank, then I usually cite the institution that conducted the survey.” His defence had gotten slightly more clumsy as he claimed that in some cases “it was not possible to link back”. He further added and said, “My columns are often data-heavy, so I try to use common sense, putting a source into the text when it was necessary.” It would appear from this that he only selectively quoted sources, but if the blog has to be believed the percentage is not selective at all. [caption id=“attachment_1097483” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A file photo of Fareed Zakaria. AP[/caption] Also as the duo have pointed out, in many cases Zakaria simply took numbers from articles in other publications, without double-checking the current numbers. For instance, in one article on Mexico, which appears to have been clearly plagiarized from an older Economist article, Zakaria even forgot to change the years. The authors notes:

“The Economist article, written in 2011, cites the $400 billion Mexico did in trade with the US ’last year’ – that is, 2010. Zakaria, apparently forgetting that The Economist article was written the previous August, also says ’last year.’”

It’s evident that Zakaria blindly copied the numbers from the Economist without even doing a search for the latest data. While Zakaria might insist that he didn’t steal opinion or that the data is public data, the fact remains that he didn’t cite the source. Since he’s happy to use data to make his point, common sense would also indicate that the source for that data be presented, else it seems like Zakaria just happens to know all these numbers. When the bloggers had first given out examples of Zakaria’s plagiarism in August, CNN had also come to the journalist’s defence saying: “CNN has the highest confidence in the excellence and integrity of Fareed Zakaria’s work In 2012, we conducted an extensive review of his original reporting for CNN, and beyond the initial incident for which he was suspended and apologised for, found nothing that violated our standards. In the years since, we have found nothing that gives us cause for concern.” Also The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, had termed the charges unfair and reckless. Interestingly, Zakaria isn’t _Our Bad Media’_s first target, who in July had exposed how _BuzzFeed’_s Viral Politics editor Benny Johnson had been plagiarizing from all over the web. BuzzFeed had then fired Johnson and agreed to review his works. As this piece in Politico had pointed out, BuzzFeed’s editor Ben Smith had told his staff in an internal memo that the decision to let Johnson “go was not taken lightly.” While BuzzFeed, which is often mocked as just a not-so-serious-publication, was quick to fire Johnson, it seems that CNN is unlikely to take any action against Zakaria, given that they dismissed the charges last time as well. It’s possible as the authors have written in their blog post, that while they are writing their post, Zakaria is “plagiarising.” The authors also pointed out that more recently, CNN fired a news editor Marie-Louise Gumuchian for plagiarism as well. According to a _ Washington Post s_tory Gumuchian had copied a lot of her work from Reuters and that CNN had then issued a statement saying: “Trust, integrity and simply giving credit where it’s due are among the tenets of journalism we hold dear, and we regret that we published material that did not reflect those essential standards.” Given the long list that has been put out by the authors, it remains to be seen if CNN will apply the same standards of “trust and integrity” when it comes to judging Zakaria’s work. Even if CNN doesn’t, Zakaria’s reputation is unlikely to recover.