Salon.com > Fareed Zakaria

Ill Doctrine on plagiarism in hip-hop

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:47:00 +0000

Ill Doctrine: Can Ghostwriters Keep It Real? from ANIMALNewYork.com on Vimeo.

Why we need to rethink the rules for hip-hop & creativity.

Plagiarists’ addictive, stressful world

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:05:00 +0000

Fareed Zakaria says he just confused his notes. When writers are accused of plagiarism, the excuses sound familiar

America’s worst historians

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes when he directly borrowed John Locke’s ideas and language to declare the principle of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But, by definition, we could call what he did plagiarism.

The major moral lesson to be taken from the Fareed Zakaria scandal is not what the media focused on this past week. Yes, he lifted material concerning the long, mostly unknown history of gun control, and he did so transparently. Even if he hadn’t been obliged to come up with an article for Time on a short deadline, he would still have taken more or less the same steps, and for a reason that, on the surface, makes perfect sense: The history he needed to tap into was too involved for someone trained as a journalist to investigate in depth.

Michael Barthel’s probing piece in Salon about transparency and credibility in the Internet age aims at the heart of the problem. But for professional historians, there’s more to it than the cut-and-paste freedom that the Web invites. Plagiarism is both a broader and touchier issue than most people imagine it to be – outright “copying.” It is ultimately a question of originality.

Cut, paste, plagiarize

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:36:00 +0000

Major media organizations had faith in Fareed Zakaria. CNN gave him 60 minutes each week -- several million dollars' worth of time -- to say whatever the hell he wanted, more or less. Time gave him a column, too, the one in which (as reported by conservative media blog NewsBusters) he reprinted barely changed paragraphs from Jill Lepore's New Yorker article on gun control, and for which offense he has now been suspended from both perches.

No, really, it’s plagiarism

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:24:00 +0000

I won’t dwell on this for too long, but last week Fareed Zakaria was suspended from both Time and CNN for plagiarizing a portion of a column (for Time) and a blog post (for CNN) on gun control from a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. When this came to light, Zakaria immediately apologized:

Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

This was the classy and correct thing to do; after all, this wasn’t a close-call type of case: An entire, 68-word paragraph of Zakaria’s CNN piece had appeared, word-for-word, in Lepore’s essay. In his Time column, Zakaria changed around a few words, but he also borrowed a few more sentences. Here’s Zakaria in Time (the identical words are in bold):