Fareed Zakaria Suspended for Plagiarism

How dumb do you have to be to plagiarize from one high profile publication, for another high profile publication?

 

Perhaps I just overestimate his intelligence--which is possible, since he turns out dreck in the David Brooks and Tom Friedman mold--but my guess would be he must have interns help draft his column and he signed off on this without checking. He can't simply blame this on copy-and-paste--someone made a deliberate effort to change the words. And I simply can't imagine he'd think he'd get away with this.

But maybe he is dumber than I think. Too much time thinking about BIG!!!! IDEAS!!!!!

 

Firing offense. Hasta la vista.

 

Yeah, but is that really a punishment for him? Writing for Time is just a small part of his enterprise. It will only really hurt him if the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE stop listening to him after this.

 

No mention of investigating previous work, to see if he's plagiarized anything else.

Isn't that standard procedure? Or shouldn't it be?

It's like they don't want to know.

 

Part of the problem of the journalist-as-conglomerate business model. I've respected a lot of his work, but this is indeed a firing offense.

 

How hard is it, especially if you have a staff working for you, to say, "hey I think this article is really on the money. Sit down and write something LIKE it" ? And attribute.

I mean, shit, for 15 years now, everybody in the world has had computer search engines. You lift phrases and paragraphs, you are GOING to get caught. It's not "likely," it's a goddamn lock.

 

Agreed. Why would he do that? Makes no sense.

 

I think the key here is finding out whether he really did this. It's pretty egregious. Perhaps Zakaria asked an intern--either unfamiliar with plagiarism rules*, or lazy--to draft something, and submitted it to Time with throughly checking it.

* And you'd be surprised, but there are well-educated people that think they've properly paraphrased when they've changed a few words from the original.

 

All these high-profile plagiarism outings the last few years and the last few weeks in particular leaves me wondering if it's plagiarism that's more pervasive in the information age, or just that it's harder to get away with these days.

 

It's easier -- you have probably 95% of the news content of the entire nation available at your fingertips -- but it's also much harder to get away with than in the olden days.

Back in the olden days if somebody cared enough to search out out-of-town newspapers and crib somebody, the original author/victim might well never hear about it. Now all it takes is one person with a bug up their ass and 15 minutes on Google and most plagiarists are caught dead to rights.

 

Not fired (yet). Suspended for a month. Time Inc. comes down firmly on the side of brand names rather than the integrity of their product. Then they wonder why no one buys it.
I miss journalism, but I'm also glad I'm out. I couldn't live with the obvious corruption now, I think.