Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Copy That

Fareed Zakaria stands accused of plagiarism again.

The pair of anonymous Twitter users who last month exposed a BuzzFeed editor’s plagiarism came out with new accusations Tuesday against journalist Fareed Zakaria.

On their blog Our Bad Media, the Twitter duo who use the handles @blippoblappo and @crushingbort assembled twelve passages of what they said appeared to be plagiarism by the Peabody-award winning journalist.

The accusations reopen an incident from 2012 in which Zakaria apologized for plagiarizing New Yorker’s Jill Lepore. The incident got him suspended from his job as editor-at-large at Time magazine as well as suspended from his hosting gig at CNN. He also volunteered to temporarily halt his column for the Washington Post for one month.

Plagiarists are like people who cheat on their spouses; they never think they’ll get caught, and when they are, it’s “Honey, I’m sorry and it’ll never happen again.  Besides, it didn’t mean anything.  Gimme one more chance.”  Feh.