Friday, August 10, 2012

Fareed Zakaria, Council on Foreign Relations Member, Caught Plagiarizing

Fareed Zakaria is so used to spitting out Council on Foreign Relations propaganda that he must have forgotten that he can't regurgitate in the outside world things that he reads elsewhere in the outside world.

Zakaria is a member of the CFR and one of the few go to on air reporters that CFR members consider safe to be interviewed by. Charlie Rose is the only other television host that comes to mind.

But the topic of this post is not his willingness to throw  softball questions at the powers that be, but the fact that he is, apparently, a plagirist.

NYT has the details:
Some passages in Mr. Zakaria’s column, “The Case for Gun Control,” closely tracked those in a longer article on guns in America by the historian Jill Lepore in the April 23 issue of The New Yorker. Earlier this year, Mr. Zakaria was criticized for giving a commencement speech at Harvard that was very similar to the one he had earlier given at Duke.
An example of the repetition of Ms. Lepore’s work in Mr. Zakaria’s column follows:
Mr. Zakaria:
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. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.
Ms. Lepore:
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. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
Zakaria is apologizing profusely:
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 23 issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is enti
TIME magazine has suspended him.
---
UPDATE: CNN now suspends. J Rubin tweets:
email from CNN. Fareed Zakaria suspended after a review of blog post on same issue w/similar unattributed excerpts.

13 comments:

  1. Yeah. They're so righteous about plagiarism.
    When it's a colored guy.

    I notice no one named names when it was Taibbi or Morgenson or many others who pick up stories wholesale without attributing.

    Zakaria should go..just for being such tool, but compared to dozens of others, this is trivial.

    South Asian types are out of favor, now that the action has moved east.

    That's the main thing I learn from this and from the Gupta conviction.
    Some things never change.

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    Replies
    1. Seriously. Using the race card? Zakaria is a NWO shill. He should know better since he went to Harvard.

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  2. what do you expect,he's a douche

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  3. LOL. What a surpise that a cheater makes it to such high places.

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  4. They'll welcome him back once he writes a Lincoln hagiography.

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  5. The less we have to hear (his own words or otherwise) from this anti-Constitution shill Zakaria the better.

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  6. This guy is about as dull as they come. I can't blame him for spicing up his drivel with a little plagiarism. He's not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.

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  7. So the New World Order tool is bowing and scraping now. What a surprise. A week from now he will be reinstated quietly and it will be like nothing ever happened. With Big Media the fix is always in.

    P.S. Wenzel, I promise I am not a netbot. However, though I am unfortunately human, I am having increasing difficulty reading your random security code generator. The characters seem increasingly distorted. Please make it easier on us actual human respondents.

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  8. Only the true idiots would belong to such group as the CFR, not to forget as well the Bilderberg group, the Skull & Bones, etc.

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  9. Is this so bad? Wouldn't the anti-IP crowd say you can't plagiarize since you have as much property right in those words (none) as the person who wrote them first? Did his contract specifically state he cannot use language first crafted by others? Even if it did, doesn't he have just as much right to those words as their original author?

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  10. I don't believe anyone suggests he committed a crime, anti-IP or not. Certainly anyone can find his actions to be unethical and worthy of discipline. Vices are not crimes sayeth Spooner.

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  11. At least he admitted it and apologized.

    I didn't notice anyone else doing that. Besides, there's a strange double standard in plagiarism.

    Lifting entire conceptual frameworks, while changing the pattern of words is treated as unethical but not IP violation, but copying certain phrases (even if they are perfectly trivial) is treated as IP violation....

    He should certainly have mentioned her piece, or he's just using her work and insight as his, right? But then I've seen this blog plagiarized in the financial media dozens of times, and no ones said a thing.

    So the idea that this is some kind of unusual act is simply laughable.

    It will please the OWS crowd though.

    FZ made some terribly PR missteps on TV - like blaming Americans for consuming too much, and telling them to consume less. That video is high up on his google search, no doubt to fuel the subtext that the financial crisis was caused by outsourcing to Asia (read, India).

    China doesn't work, since that wouldn't play to the commies/lefties (OWS) and the racists.
    India does. It doesn't help him that he's also Muslim.

    The inflationistas, the paper money crowd, the OWS crowd, the union people, the unemployed and bankrupt, the white nationalists, the anti-immigrants aren't going to take kindly to some Bombay Muslim guy lecturing them about how much to consume and blaming them for being bankrupt, the uppity wog.

    Meanwhile, the bankers pulling the strings have a chortle, because guess who loves consumption, debt and paper money?

    Theater...

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  12. Morgenson plagiarism:

    dailykos.com/story/2012/03/28/1035960/-Reckless-Endangerment-Plagiarizes-Text-From-The-American-Enterprise-Institute

    http://www.nytpick.com/2009/12/whats-wrong-with-what-gretchen.html

    Taibbi plagiarism:
    http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/matt-taibbi-michele-bachmann-rolling-stone-plagiarism_b38382

    (although when he did it, all the liberal critics rushed out to tell us it really wasn't)

    Then Taibbi rehabilitates himself by using Byrne to point out Weiss's plagiarism

    http://www.deepcapture.com/barrons-gary-weiss-caught-plagiarizing-matt-taibbi-find-replaces-style-with-spin/

    And so it goes.

    Another hilarious chapter in the annals of propaganda and doublespeak....

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