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Plagiarism watchdogs target Fareed Zakaria

The anonymous watchdogs who outed BuzzFeed's Benny Johnson for serial plagiarism have set their sights on a far bigger target: Fareed Zakaria, the veteran foreign policy journalist who has claimed that a previous plagiarism incident was merely a "terrible mistake."

In Tuesday's report, @blippoblappo & @crushingbort cite 12 instances where Zakaria appears to have lifted passages wholesale from other authors. Their findings cast doubt on the three news outlets — Time Magazine, CNN and The Washington Post — which claimed to have conducted reviews of Zakaria's work and found the so-called "mistake" to be an isolated incident.

"In short, Zakaria was in the clear after what three of the biggest news outlets in America wrote off as an isolated, one-time mistake," the two users write on their website, Our Bad Media. "[But] the examples below seem unlikely to have been the result of another notes mix-up by Zakaria."

Those examples include entire sentences or paragraphs that appear to have been lifted from Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg News, The Center for American Progress, Forbes, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and Wikipedia.

"Fareed Zakaria is a news editor and a New York Times bestselling author who holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard," @blippoblappo & @crushingbort write. "In other words, someone who should be more than familiar with proper citation by now. The above examples are from a span of less than two years and do not include his work since, his columns at Newsweek from 2001-2010, or the books he wrote before 2012."

"These examples raise far more serious questions about the integrity of Zakaria’s editors at CNN, TIME, and the Washington Post, all of whom claimed to have conducted similar reviews and found nothing," they write. "In the light of our findings, we have to call bullshit. It took less than an hour and a few Google searches for us at Our Bad Media to find an example of lifting in Zakaria’s columns written before the 2012 plagiarism scandal. So we’re left to wonder: did TIME, CNN, or the Washington Post actually conduct good faith reviews of Zakaria’s work? Have they since?"

Zakaria, Time, CNN and The Washington Post have yet to comment on the report. We will update here if and when they do.

UPDATE (2:46 p.m.): Time Magazine spokesperson Daniel Kile emails:

While Fareed Zakaria is no longer employed by Time Inc., TIME takes these charges very seriously. In 2012, we conducted a review of Zakaria's work for TIME and were satisfied with the results of that investigation. We will be reviewing these new allegations carefully.

UPDATE (4:11 p.m.): Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt emails:

If I'm not mistaken, the newest allegations feature only one WP column, and when I looked at that I thought it was so far from a case of plagiarism that it made me question the entire enterprise. Take a look. Fareed uses some budgetary information that is also cited in a Center for American Progress report. There's no lifting of language, and I'm sure I could find the same data in a dozen other reports. I honestly think it is reckless even to suggest this is plagiarism. In 2012, Fareed as I recall copped to a misdeed, which he attributed to being spread too thin. At that time he made adjustments to his schedule and commitments to keep a similar thing from happening. We went through the previous few years of columns—I can't remember the software we used, but we ran them through two different engines—and found no evidence at all of any plagiarism.

UPDATE (6:41 p.m.): CNN spokesperson Jennifer Dargan emails:

CNN has the highest confidence in the excellence and integrity of Fareed Zakaria's work. In 2012, we conducted an extensive review of his original reporting for CNN, and beyond the initial incident for which he was suspended and apologized for, found nothing that violated our standards. In the years since we have found nothing that gives us cause for concern.