Has Fareed Zakaria channeled his inner Mike Barnicle?
Reading that Zakaria has been suspended indefinitely by CNN and for one month by Time for plagiarizing a recent New Yorker article (how dumb is that?) reminded me that the execrable Mike Barnicle still appears on The Morning Joe. From Wikipedia:
In 1998, Barnicle resigned from the Boston Globe amid allegations of fabrication and plagiarism. Barnicle’s October 8, 1995, column recounted the story of two sets of parents with cancer-stricken children. When one of the boys, a black child, died, the parents of the other boy, a white child who had begun to recover, sent the dead child’s parents a check for $10,000. When the Globe could not locate the people who had not been publicly identified, Barnicle insisted nonetheless that the story was true. He said he did not obtain the story from the parents but from a nurse, whom he declined to identify. Mrs. Patricia Shairs later contacted the Globe to indicate that the story Barnicle wrote was about her family, although she said some of the facts were incorrect.
The second column in question contained more than 80 lines of humorous observations dated August 2, 1998, about a third of which plagiarized observations from the 1997 book Brain Droppings by George Carlin.[5] Although Barnicle said he had never read the book, the editor of the Globe issued a temporary suspension. WCVB-TV then aired a video clip of Barnicle recommending the book to viewers for upcoming summer reading, saying it had a “yuk on every page.” Globe editor called for his resignation but this was rescinded under fire from readers, advertisers and a group of media personalities. Instead the suspension period doubled.[6]
Sorry, but to me, as a longtime professional writer and now CEO of a media company, plagiarism is a one-time offense. It’s villainous theft of intellectual property from your peers. Do it once, get caught and find another profession. (There are plenty.) Barnicle should not be appearing on The Morning Joe and I don’t want to read or another word from Fareed Zakaria ever.
And that goes for fancy-shmancy historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin too. Go away – all of you.
And now for The Great Lobachevsky.
This one has always stumped me. I too am a writer (not as famous, well-compensated, or whatever, but I have been paid to write things, and occasionally still am) and I understand the impulse to be angry about this sort of thing. On the other hand, especially with history, sometimes the accusations can get to be a bit much. Stephen B. Oates, for instance, was accused of plagarism, when for all intents and purposes what he did was recount events in Lincoln’s life in the order in which they happened. It was a bit more than that, but not much.
Stephen Ambrose was a bit tougher. When you get to that level of historian, where they publish bestsellers every 3-5 years and get millions of dollars in advances, the author doesn’t write every word himself, oftentimes. Instead, they employ “research assistants” who do much of the writing, and who also do things like fact-checking, and comparing the manuscript with the sources to try and make sure they won’t be open to plagarism charges. Here and there, in Ambrose’s works, there were passages that replicated a section of one of the books in the bibliography. If you’re going to plagarize someone, it’s pretty doubtful that you’d cite that book as your source, which implies that Mr. Ambrose didn’t know what had happened–that it wasn’t conscious. On the other hand, his books made millions, and those that he cribbed from made a *lot* less.
Same with Doris Kearns Goodwin. She’s gone on to win a Pulitzer, and apparently has put the whole thing behind her.
Zakaria I have an impression of as an idiot. I can’t remember anything specific he wrote that I read, but I seem to remember something that I dismissed as claptrap, and I tend to ignore stuff when I see he wrote it, these days. I saw the two paragraphs, his and the one written by the other writer, and while they’re similar, they’re not the same, by any stretch of the matter. When I was a kid, I was told plagarism was *copying* what someone else wrote. If it’s rephrasing it, then a lot of people are in trouble, and it’ll be almost impossible to write anything new once someone else has addressed a subject.
Mr. Nicholas, some years back, when I was on the board of directors of the Writers Guild, I was asked to judge plagiarism accusations in screen and television writing where a lot of money was often in the balance. Some of them were tough calls, but thinking back to then, instances ilke Zakaria would have been a no-brainer. I would have a second look at those paragraphs. They’re identical in structure and practically identical in wording.
As for Kearns Goodwin winning a Pulitzer, so did Walter Duranty. Not sure I get your point.
It’s the quote that should seal the deal. As anybody who has written knows, quotes chosen to basically summarize the point of a paragraph have to be chosen deliberately. They just don’t magically appear. You have to go find them. The chance that both the non-quote material was the same in the passage, by coincidence, and the quote itself was the same, by coincidence, in the same place, by coincidence, is basically impossible.
NOBODY RHYMES LIKE RHYMIN’ LEHRER.
This is probably not the first time Zakaria has stolen from someone. It’s just the first time he got caught. You may have heard this before.
Does anyone remember Micheal Bellesiles? What is it about gun control that drives activist “intellectuals” to destroy their career utterly?
Roger, when somebody “borrows” a product concept in business and makes a cheap imitation, it’s called a “knockoff”.
CNN is now “knockoff news”.
In fact, the leftist mass media is nothing but cheap imitation, sleazy, cheesy and greasy. Zakaria’s GPS is stuck on the highway to hell.
– and watch Imus instead.
– Biden to the list.