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.
We are in an era where machines write tens of thousands of wikipedia articles and how-to manuals yet we’re supposed to be outraged when a person does it. There are only so many ways to state reality. You will end up repeating yourself no matter what, and should if you want to drive your point home.
Plagiarism in 2014 sounds too much like jealousy and sour grapes. If you don’t like what he said, don’t read his articles, problem solved.
You’re kidding, right? Seems like maybe you’ve plagiarized too? Zakaria is a hack, and now he’s been exposed. Good to know he has at least one hapless fan left!
Uh, those are 3 paragraphs lifted without context. That goes far past “repeating yourself”.
But … but. Plagiarizing is sooooo much easier than having to write original material.
I do not follow his work, nor am I in a line of work where plagiarism is an issue. As a news consumer, I could not possibly care less. Seems like inside baseball, made irrelevant by machines which rip off humans at an astonishing rate, but that’s not plagiarism? Who cares? I certainly do not.
Information exists regardless of authorship. The writing robots have seen to that. As time goes on, it will be almost impossible not to plagiarize because there are only so many descriptions of reality that refuse to pass muster from a pedantic plagiarizing-sniffing robot.
In other words, it’s the What, not the Who.