Bloggers Now Accuse Zakaria Of Plagiarizing In His ‘Post-American’ Book

Fareed Zakaria - April 26, 2011 - TIME 100 GALA: TIME'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD- RED CARPET held at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC. Photo Credit: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick... Fareed Zakaria - April 26, 2011 - TIME 100 GALA: TIME'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD- RED CARPET held at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC. Photo Credit: Sylvain Gaboury/PatrickMcMullan.com/Sipa Press/timearrpmcsipa.010/1104280121 (Sipa via AP Images) MORE LESS
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Two anonymous bloggers published more allegations of plagiarism against Fareed Zakaria on Friday, offering what they said was evidence the journalist plagiarized passages in one of his best-known books.

The bloggers who go by the names @blippoblappo and @crushingbort on Twitter argued in a post on their website that Zakaria’s 2011 book “The Post-American World: Release 2.0” contained passages that borrowed heavily from articles in The Christian Science Monitor and the World Policy Journal without citation.

In one example, the duo posted a portion of Zakaria’s book alongside a 2007 article in The Christian Science Monitor by foreign policy scholar Fawaz Gerges.

Here is the passage from Zakaria’s book, which was viewed Friday by TPM:

And here is the article by Gerges:

The bloggers posted their own color-coded comparison of the two passages:

This particular portion of the book later appeared in one of Zakaria’s cover stories for Newsweek.

The post Friday by the anonymous duo listed six examples which demonstrated, as they put it, how Zakaria “blatantly and repeatedly plagiarized.”

“On more than a number of occasions, Zakaria has taken entire paragraphs from the authors and shifted them around in an apparent attempt to avoid detection,” the duo wrote.

However, in one example pointed to by the bloggers, Zakaria did appear to have cited Gerges by name while writing about the scholar’s analysis of polling. Other examples the duo cited appeared to be murkier, including one in which both Zakaria and another author appeared to have quoted from the same editorial.

TPM reached out to Zakaria and his publisher, W.W. Norton and Company, on Friday morning. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment.

Friday’s post was a follow-up to another one the bloggers published earlier this week that cited a dozen examples of what they described as plagiarism in Zakaria’s writing for CNN, The Washington Post and Time magazine.

Zakaria strongly denied the bloggers’ initial allegations. He said the majority of the items cited by the bloggers were “facts, not someone else’s writing or opinions or expressions.”

In 2012, Zakaria was briefly suspended from Time and CNN and was forced to apologize after being caught plagiarizing from The New Yorker magazine. At the time, he described it “a terrible mistake” and portrayed it as a singular lapse.

TPM’s Tom Kludt contributed to this report.

Latest Livewire
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: