Newsweek responded on Monday to plagiarism accusations against its former columnist Fareed Zakaria by adding a disclaimer to all of his articles that appear on the magazine’s website.
The disclaimer, posted on Zakaria’s author page as well as beneath each individual article, noted that his work has come under scrutiny and that his contributions to Newsweek took place under a different owner.
Here’s the disclaimer:
Fareed Zakaria worked for Newsweek when it was under previous ownership. Readers are advised that some of his articles have been the subject of complaints claiming that they contain material that should have been attributed to others. In addition, readers with information about articles by Mr. Zakaria that may purportedly lack proper attribution are asked to e-mail Newsweek at corrections@newsweek.com
Newsweek posted the updates following a string of allegations by anonymous bloggers who go by the aliases @blippoblappo and @crushingbort. The pair has accused Zakaria of plagiarism in articles he wrote for Newsweek, Time magazine, and the Washington Post as well as in work he has done for CNN.
CNN and the Washington Post have defended the integrity of Zakaria’s work.
On Sunday CNN host Brian Stelter aired a segment on the allegations and said Zakaria’s show for the channel had “made some attribution mistakes.” Stelter stopped short of blaming Zakaria directly for the problems.
In 2012, Zakaria apologized for plagiarizing New Yorker’s Jill Lepore. The incident got him suspended from Time magazine as well as his show on CNN. He also volunteered to temporarily halt his column for the Washington Post for a month.
Newsweek’s updates came after a Twitter exchange on Friday, in which @blippoblappo tweeted at the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jim Impoco and brought up Zakaria’s work:
crushingbort and blippoblappo are jon meacham and rick stengel
— John Cook (@johnjcook) September 26, 2014
@johnjcook Dodged a bullet I did.
— jim impoco (@jimpoco) September 27, 2014
[jon meachem voice] Jim…my man…you are obligated to issue retractions for the Newsweek articles Zakaria plagiarized @jimpoco @johnjcook
— j. edgar blupman (@blippoblappo) September 27, 2014
Impoco eventually stated he would investigate:
@johnjcook OK, OK. I hear you. Will investigate. Call off the trolls. Not constructive. Realize you didn’t summon them. Call?
— jim impoco (@jimpoco) September 27, 2014
On Monday, Impoco offered another observation about the allegations, this time pointed at The Washington Post, which previously owned the magazine:
@markberman I bet those same Zakaria articles were published the @washingtonpost, which owned Newsweek then. Notice?
— jim impoco (@jimpoco) September 29, 2014
Meh. It’s not like he’s a real journalist.
Is Newsweek still around? I thought it went under.
Zacharia…some people love him. Frankly, I don’t. I find him to be whatever you call a Foreign Policy Contrarian. Sometimes he’s for war with caveats, and sometimes he’s not, again, with caveats…Altogether, he’s rarely consistent. Which leads me to believe that most of the plagiarism charges against him probably have some merit. He has no core convictions anyone has been able to identify all these years…and that’s from people who seem to know him. If that’s what being a Centrist is all about…I call that bullshit elitism.
I believe he’s been on the board of several foreign policy organizations. He’s a think-tank bloviator, not a real journalist who goes around the world at the ground level to learn vitally new information about the countries he talks about. He has a kind of book knowledge without the kind of personal experience one would expect of a foreign policy expert. I would bet he stays perched above the rest of the countries he reports on, maintaining his effete status, hobnobbing with the other foreign policy in-country elites, who really never venture far outside the food court of many 5 star hotels around the world. Something tells me, that’s where he gets his unique world view. There’s a lot of that these days when it comes to foreign policy. Sadly, they’re all on cable news too or have moved on to the military contracting business in one form or another.
Intellectually, the concept of columnists has always been, and will forever be, bullsht. I imagine most of these people have legitimate ideas at various times, but none of us has enough insight to write a column every week. The paradigm inevitably leads to an endless flow of bullsht.
Whenever I see stuff like this, I think of a College Game Day commercial from a few years ago. Lee Corso nails it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd0Zo6h9FOQ
That’s what you get for giving a plagiarist a second chance.