The anonymous bloggers who accused Fareed Zakaria of plagiarism this week promised on Wednesday that even more revelations are to come.
In a blog post responding to Zakaria’s critique of their original article, the duo who go by the names @blippoblappo and @crushingbort said they planned to publish further evidence of plagiarism.
In a statement on Tuesday evening, Zakaria dismissed their initial report, saying none of the passages they had pointed to constituted plagiarism.
Zakaria’s employers at CNN and the Washington Post also responded. The Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt called the charges “reckless” and stood by Zakaria.
In their post on Wednesday, the anonymous pair disputed Zakaria’s rebuttal point-by-point and concluded with a warning that more is to come.
“’Reckless’ is also a funny choice of words for someone who just assumed that this was all we had to post,” they wrote, referencing Hiatt’s statement supporting Zakaria.
“Our Bad Media will have more extensive examples of plagiarism by Fareed Zakaria later this week,” they wrote.
If plagiarism required an audience Fareed would still be quite safe.
Honestly, these examples of plagiarism are pretty lackluster. Most of the time when these people are saying Zakaria used “identical language,” it’s not identical. Many of the examples are almost pure recitations of statistics, which kind of misses the point of why plagiarism is bad. (It’s about stealing ideas and marketing them as your own. Reciting stats is hardly that.)