CNN and Time magazine CNN and Time magazine have suspended columnist and TV host Fareed Zakaria, 48, after he admitted to plagiarizing part of a New Yorker article on gun control.
According to Fox News, Time issued a statement Friday that it had suspended Zakaria’s column for a month while it investigates the matter further. CNN followed up later in the day announcing its own suspension, adding that it had removed a column by Zakaria on the same issue from its website.
Zakaria said in a statement Friday he made “a terrible mistake,” adding, “It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault.” In Zakaria’s statement, he apologized “unreservedly” to Lepore, as well as to his editors and readers.
“What he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well,” Zelenko said.
Media reporters had noted similarities between passages in Zakaria’s column about gun control that appeared in Time’s Aug. 20 issue, and paragraphs from an article by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore published in April in The New Yorker magazine. In Zakaria’s column, titled “The Case for Gun Control,” he began one paragraph with the sentences: “Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in `Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.’ Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic.”
A corresponding passage in Lenore’s New Yorker essay, titled “Battleground America,” begins: “As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, `Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,’ firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start.”
Besides serving as an editor-at-large at Time, Zakaria is a Washington Post columnist and the host of CNN’s foreign-affairs show, “GPS.” Born in India and a naturalized American citizen, he is a Yale graduate and was awarded a PhD from Harvard.
NOT FIRED
Why wasn’t he fired? Lesser mortals would have been.
ZAKARIA, STEVE PENN
Another “why” question: Why hasn’t anyone on Wall Street gone to jail for their role in the financial crisis of 2008, and why hasn’t anyone associated with BP gone to jail for their role in the Gulf oil spill of 2010? But I digress. What Zakaria did happens in high schools and colleges across America all the time – a simple rewrite of someone else’s material for a paper that was due yesterday. Not that I approve of what he did, of course. An error in judgment? Yes. Grounds for dismissal? Well, let’s just see what the internal investigations reveal. That’s why the Steve Penn case is of such interest to me.