Fareed Zakaria Apologizes For Plagiarism

Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for Time Magazine and CNN host, was recently accused of plagiarizing a piece from the New Yorker.

Zakaria admitted today that he did indeed steal a paragraph written by Jill Lepore and apologized for his “terrible mistake.”

Zakaria said:

“Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”

According to the Huffington Post, the plagiarism was initially spotted by conservative watchdog Newsbusters. The organization pointed out that a Zakaria used a nearly identical paragraph in his piece on gun control that Jill Lepore used in the New Yorker last April.

Here is the opening sentence from the paragraph in question.

Lepore writes:

“As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start.”

Zakaria writes:

“Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic.”

Politico reports that Time Magazine has decided to suspend Zakaria’s column for one month.

A spokesman for the magazine said:

“TIME accepts Fareed’s apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed’s column for a month, pending further review.”