“I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to [Jill Lepore], to my editors at Time, and to my readers.” That was the apology offered by Fareed Zakaria on August 10, 2012, after he was caught plagiarizing a 7,700- word New Yorker article by Lepore for an article that he published in Time magazine.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Zakaria holds a PhD from Harvard University. The Ivy League school has declined to take action against its president, Claudine Gay, who has been outed as a serial plagiarist. Like antisemitism, plagiarizing the work of others just might be commonplace at Harvard.
Zakaria regularly wrote columns for Time and the Washington Post, and he has hosted a program on CNN. Time and CNN suspended Zakaria for a week, a relatively light punishment for someone who had been dogged in the past for using the work of others without attribution. In a matter of days, all three outlets claimed they reviewed Zakaria’s other work in their respective news organizations and pronounced him free of scandal.
However, allegations of plagiarism have plagued Zakaria for a long time. Three years earlier, in 2009, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic noticed that Zakaria used some of Goldberg’s work without proper attribution. Goldberg cited a May 2009 Zakaria column in Newsweek magazine. Zakaria was the magazine’s editor at the time.
In a column titled “What You Know About Iran is Wrong,” Zakaria had the following sentence: “In an interview last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Iranian regime as ‘a messianic, apocalyptic cult.’” Goldberg observed that the sentence was worded to leave the reader with the impression that Zakaria interviewed Netanyahu. However, Goldberg pointed out, it was he who interviewed Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister offered that description of the Iranian regime, and Goldberg reported it in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic.
Goldberg further noted the interview was conducted in March and not “last week” (in May), as Zakaria claimed. This was probably not a case of Zakaria carelessly forgetting to properly attribute the interview to Goldberg. If that were so, then Zakaria would have at least mentioned the interview took place in March and not two months later, which he implied when he wrote “last week.” The wording suggests conscious deception on the part of Zakaria.
Goldberg then reported Zakaria had another sentence in the same Newsweek column that appeared to have been copied from Goldberg’s work, yet again. This time the material came from a New York Times op-ed Goldberg authored.
One failure to properly attribute work might be a mistake. But two or more failures appear to indicate a pattern of intentionally appropriating the work of others without attribution. As one Washington Post columnist wrote, “It didn’t come as a huge surprise” to learn Zakaria was “embroiled in a plagiarism scandal.” That observation probably should have set off alarms at the Post, but it apparently did not.
Then came the revelation that Zakaria had lifted the work of another author to add to his 2008 book The Post-American World. Zakaria used a quote from a technology official that first appeared in a book published in 2005. Clyde Prestowitz, the author of the 2005 book, claimed he contacted Zakaria, and Zakaria’s editor and publisher, about his work being used without attribution, but none of the three responded to him.
Zakaria defended his failure to attribute because it would “interrupt the flow for the reader,” as if footnotes in his written work would present some kind of obstacle not found in other footnoted works. However, the updated version of The Post-American World properly cited Prestowitz’s work.
There was more. Back in 1998, Zakaria wrote a story for Slate about the martini cocktail. Yep, he generously appropriated the work of another. In this case, Zakaria copied from an article authored by Max Rudin in American Heritage.
Zakaria’s record of appropriating the work of others did not end with those four cases. In August 2014, exactly two years after Zakaria apologized for plagiarizing Lepore, a pair of citizen watchdogs published a detailed takedown of Zakaria engaging in the same bad journalistic behavior. The anonymous watchdogs, blogging under a website named Our Bad Media, gave a dozen examples of Zakaria again using the work of others without giving proper credit.
The Washington Post and CNN both dismissed the watchdog report, with CNN going so far as stating the news organization had “the highest confidence in the excellence and integrity” in Zakaria’s work. Plagiarism is no big deal when their columnists do it, the outlets reasoned.
Undeterred, the media watchdog bloggers followed up the following month, September 2014. Our Bad Media detailed two dozen times Zakaria used the work of others without proper attribution in his CNN show. This time, the Washington Post and CNN did not publicly comment, but the two media outlets and others including Slate and Newsweek began posting editor’s notes to Zakaria’s work addressing his failure to properly attribute the work he appropriated from other authors.
It appears CNN and the Washington Post are finished with disciplining Zakaria when he violates commonly accepted rules of journalism.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter (X), Threads, Gettr, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).