Pundit Fareed Zakaria was suspended from CNN and Time after a paragraph in his Time column turned out to be a nearly word-for-word duplicate of a passage by New Yorker writer Jill Lepore
Zakaria’s version, Aug 20:
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.”
Lepore’s original, Apr 23:
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 has apologized: “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.”
Bizarrely, journalist Edward Jay Epstein insists in the Daily Beast that Zarkaria is not guilty of plagiarism.
According to Epstein, it wasn’t plagiarism to lift Jill Lepore’s words nearly verbatim because Lepore was explicitly and correctly citing Adam Winkler’s book:
Zakaria’s crime was not plagiarism. He embarrassed his employer, Time, by not sufficiently juggling the words around or employing the thesaurus to camouflage the sorry fact that instead of going to the ultimate source, the book Gunfight, he (or his assistants) used the electronic clip file. By not changing enough words, he provided the “gotcha” bait for the feeding frenzy of bloggers out for his blood. And for this embarrassment, he had to give an abject apology. But unless Time or CNN provide examples in which he took ideas from others that he did not credit to them, I submit that he is not guilty of plagiarism.
Damn right Zakaria “didn’t change enough words.” He stole Jill Lepore’s words and passed them off as his own.
As with most cases of plagiarism, Zakaria’s lapse was totally unnecessary. Since this is journalism and not academia, it would have been okay for him to restate Lepore’s analysis in his own words without explicitly crediting her. A genius like Lepore doesn’t need gratuitous validation from a hack like Zakaria anyway.
Nobody assumes that a pundit writing an op/ed is a primary source. Obviously, it’s good form for a pundit to cite generously, especially for someone like Zakaria who presents himself as a public intellectual. But it’s not necessarily a professional sin for an op/ed writer to write without citing. A good editor would want to know where Zakaria was getting those facts, but the citation wouldn’t necessarily make it into the published piece.
Instead of using his very broad license to paraphrase, Zakaria tried to pass Lepore’s paragraph as his own. That’s textbook plagiarism.
The fact that Epstein can’t recognize Zakaria’s behavior as plagiarism raises serious questions about his own journalistic ethics.
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