On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> wrote:
> Has Zakaria offered any public explanation/justification for what he > did, or have his employers gagged him? > As of last time I checked early this morning, he had not (he did apologize, writing: "I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers." Plagiarism is a broad term, and can apply to lots of things, some relatively minor offenses, some gross. From what I have seen, Zakaria's offense is toward the minor side of the scale. He certainly did not pass off somebody else's ideas as his own, the central feature of the worst kind of plagiarism. He clearly credits the author and the book whose ideas he is summarizing. But he appears to have used a paragraph from another columnists summary of the ideas in the book in his own piece see http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/13/fareed-zakaria-didn-t-plagiarize.html). What probably happened (this is speculation of course, but I think reasonable) is that Zakaria had an assistant fill in paragraphs in the column, probably following an instruction like "summarize Winkler here". The assistant, rather than either taking some summary that Zakaria had already written somewhere in their files, or writing his or her own summary, googled it and took the summary from someone else, and stuck it in the piece. When Zakaria reviewed it, he either did not ask, did not check, or did not catch the reproduction, and the column was sent out. Note that Zakaria did not say he committed plagiarism, just that he made a terrible mistake, and that the took responsibility for it. This is the way busy academics and journalists work all the time, there is nothing dishonest in using editorial assistants for this kind of work. But anyone who uses this method knows that any mistake that is made is there responsibility, just as if they had literally done it themselves, and that is why they are expected to double check everything themselves before submitting it for publication. If something like what has been suggested here is what happened, then Zakaria is right that it was a mistake, and it is right that he get a fairly serious punishment (1 month suspension), but lumping it in with reporters who have made up entire stories is a histrionic and unjust distortion. As I say, there may be more to this than we know so far, and final judgement needs to be reserved pending a full investigation, which both CNN and Time are in the process of. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
