By Selwyn Duke
He really didn’t.
In penning his recent
piece “The Case for Gun Control,” Time
editor and CNN host Fareed Zakaria actually made the case that he needs to
focus on pen control. Because he
plagiarized part of his work from a New
Yorker article
written by one Jill Lepore.
Zakaria was busted
by NewsBusters, a feat that probably wasn’t too difficult since Lepore’s piece
was published less than four months ago. A slick one you are, Fareed.
But this isn’t surprising when others
grease the skids for you. While CNN and Time have suspended Zakaria, it’s
damning that he has long been able to work and plagiarize another day. After all, as Hot Air pointed
out, he has done this before—frequently.
This has made many wonder how, in an age in
which even high-school teachers utilize online services to detect lifted work,
Zakaria could be so stupid. Is he a
compulsive literary kleptomaniac or just a leftist? Or did I just repeat myself? Hot Air offers another theory:
Exit question via John Podhoretz:
Could Zakaria maybe have been farming his columns out to an intern or
assistant? That would be ethically
problematic in its own right, but it might help explain this incident. A young ghostwriter has much less to lose in
taking a risk like this and might well be more naive than Zakaria would be
about the probability of being caught.
In other words, perhaps Zakaria didn’t even
write on his own the section he didn’t write on his own…so to speak.
Whatever the case, Zakaria isn’t
alone. Hot Air mentions the recent example
of The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer, who
invented Bob Dylan quotations. The New York Times’ Jayson Blair also comes to mind (it’s always a bad
sign when the guy’s parents didn’t know how to spell his name), and the site I
just linked to mentions Stephen Glass’ fabrications
at The New Republic. Then there is Pulitzer Prize winner Alex
Haley; he used
so many passages from a book titled The
African when writing his own saga, Roots,
that he had to pay damages to the former’s author, Harold Courlander.
Now, it’s not surprising that all these
brothers in intellectual theft are liberals, as parroting groupthink substance
makes it hard to cultivate original style.
Admittedly, though, even real journalists, possessing insight,
intelligence, integrity and ability, sometimes have a similar problem when
citing facts that just can’t seem to be presented much differently than in
their original source. So, for the benefit
of Zakaria, I’ll explain what professional writers do. Zak, on the right-hand side of your keyboard,
just left of Enter, is a key for a certain symbol: ”. Now, if you use two of them in this manner,
“,” and place a limited amount of someone else’s work between them, it’s
ethical to use that text in your own articles, assuming you provide
attribution. Here’s an example: “Fareed
Zakaria is stealing other people’s work ,” tweeted the little birdie.
Of course, Zakaria really could subscribe, like
the man being quoted here, to the notion that “[i]f you’ve been successful, you
didn’t get there on your own.” After
all, like that man, he had the right skin color for the white guys who didn’t start
feeling guilty on their own and an ethnic name that just, well, dude, sounds so
cool. He has the right accent, too, so he
must be sophisticated. That’s some
serious affirmative-action action there.
At the end of the day, though, one wonders
why liberal entities would even take issue with plagiarism. Isn’t all this material just floating around
in the collective waiting to be shared, from each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs? And let’s
face it: Zakaria’s journalistic needs greatly exceed his cranial ability. (No need for citation here, as it’s well known
that Marx originated the ability-needs pap.
Except he didn’t. He stole it from French socialist Louis
Blanc.)
In reality, explaining Zakaria’s behavior
requires only the understanding that leftists lie to themselves even more than
they do to others. And while their
rationalizations harm everyone—through the policies they advocate and the
cultural effluent they disgorge—it is pleasing when, occasionally, the reality
they’ve continually denied rears up and bites them in their chair-shaped brain
housing.
Anyway, although you folks at CNN and Time are getting exactly what you
deserve in Zakaria, wouldn’t it be prudent to cut him and let him paste away
elsewhere? I mean, I know you have a
Muslim quota to fill, but I’m sure there’s an acceptable replacement you could
poach from Al Jazeera.