Time magazine suspends Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism

-The Hindu
NEW YORK :Noted Indian-American journalist and author Fareed Zakaria has been suspended by his employers CNN and Time magazine after he admitted to plagiarism and apologised for the ethical lapse.Mr Zakaria, was suspended by CNN and Time magazine after he admitted that he had plagiarised portions of an article he wrote on gun control for Time, from the New Yorker magazine.He issued an apology saying he had made a “terrible mistake” and his lifting a paragraph from the article by Harvard University professor of American history Jill Lepore was an “ethical lapse“.

Mr Zakaria, 48, a Yale and Harvard graduate, had written the column on gun control that appeared in the August 20 issue of Time magazine.Time said it was suspending Mr Zakaria’s column for a month, pending review.“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,” Ali Zelenko, a spokeswoman for the magazine said.

“As a result, we are suspending Fareed’s column for a month, pending further review,” Time said.CNN, on which Mr Zakaria hosts a weekly foreign affairs show ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’, said it would suspend the show for an indefinite period pending review.“We have reviewed Fareed Zakaria’s Time column, for which he has apologised. He wrote a shorter blog post on CNN.com on the same issue which included similar unattributed excerpts. That blog post has been removed and CNN has suspended Fareed Zakaria while this matter is under review,” CNN said.

In a statement Mr Zakaria said, “Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column on gun control, which was also a topic of conversation on this blog, bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake.”