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Zakaria has made a habit of borrowing from others. The wrongs of Fareed Zakaria

For the past month, two anonymous media watchdogs have been accusing the journalist Fareed Zakaria of serial plagiarism. Across multiple reports, the authors at Our Bad Media have cited at least three dozen instances in which the CNN host and Washington Post columnist appeared to have lifted passages from various publications and websites for unattributed reuse in his books and magazine articles and on his television program. Their most recent report, focusing on 24 instances of plagiarism on his CNN show, is the most damning to date.

This week, I conducted a review of the reports to determine whether the instances they cited truly qualified as plagiarism. I also asked two jourrnalism ethics experts — Robert Drechsel, the James E. Burgess chair and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kelly McBride, the vice president for academic programs of The Poynter Institute — to review the reports. They came to the same conclusion I did: Fareed Zakaria plagiarized.

"Most of the examples provided and analyzed by the bloggers seem to fall into the realm of what is now being called 'patch writing' — using material generated by someone else, without attribution, but rewritten slightly so one cannot call it verbatim copying," Drechsel wrote in an email to POLITICO. "It falls within what I would consider plagiarism. Other examples cited by the bloggers do appear to be verbatim."

"It seems obvious that Fareed was overly reliant on his source material," McBride wrote. "It's plagiarism. Low-level. But plagiarism."

Zakaria did not respond to a request for comment regarding the most recent accusations. In the wake of Our Bad Media's initial report, he sent an email to POLITICO rebutting the charges. "These are all facts, not someone else's writing or opinions or expressions," he wrote. He also referred to the majority of instances as "cases in my writing where I have cited a statistic that also appeared somewhere else," suggesting that he had merely repeated readily available information.

Both The Washington Post and CNN, which suspended Zakaria for one instance of plagiarism in 2012 (he called it a "mistake"), also dismissed the initial allegations from Our Bad Media. Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, said "it was so far from a case of plagiarism that it made me question the entire enterprise." A CNN spokesperson said the network "found nothing that gives us cause for concern."

Our Bad Media's latest report, which was published Tuesday, focuses on 12 instances of perceived plagiarism at CNN. In the first example, Zakaria repeats the introduction to a Dutch documentary about Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky without attribution. In the second, he lifts facts and language from a 2011 Economist article, also without attribution. Because he forgets to account for the publication date of the original article, which refers to economic data from "last year," his remarks are factually inaccurate. In the third, he borrows entire sentences from an article in Time magazine, without attribution, changing the language only slightly. So on and so forth.

It is the slight changes to language — what Drechsel identified as "patch writing" — that mask Zakaria's plagiarism. To wit, a sentence in the Time magazine article reads, "... in Dutch-speaking Flanders, locals handed out free French fries, while in Louvain-la-Neuve, in French-speaking Wallonia, free beer was on offer." On CNN, Zakaria stated, "... in Dutch-speaking Flanders, locals handed out free French fries while in French-speaking Wallonia, you could swig some free beer."

Such patch writing is evident in almost all the examples cited by Our Bad Media. In some cases Zakaria blends sentences from multiple reports, as in example #7, where he borrows from both The New Yorker and Al Jazeera. Those same sentences Zakaria read on CNN later showed up in an article he wrote for Time magazine. In neither case was the work attributed to The New Yorker or Al Jazeera.

There are different degrees of plagiarism, to be sure. Case by case, the examples here qualify more as violations or misdemeanors than serious crimes. "Low level," as McBride said. But taken together, they show an undeniable pattern of behavior. For years now, Zakaria has made a habit of borrowing facts, language and style from other sources without attributing the work to its original authors, and he has presented such material as if it were his own.

"It's not a secret that reporters often rely on the work of other reporters, documentarians and researchers," McBride said. "Sometimes reporters leave that attribution out because it's clunky or takes up too much space. But sometimes reporters leave it out because they want the audience to believe that this is the first time this information has ever been reported."

CNN declined to comment on this report but instead referred POLITICO to the statement it had released one month ago in the wake of Our Bad Media's initial accusations.

"CNN has the highest confidence in the excellence and integrity of Fareed Zakaria's work," the statement reads. "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."

Many of Zakaria's colleagues in the media seem unconcerned as well. Previous high-profle plagiarism accusations tend to result in a great deal of scrutiny and public outcry. That was true in the case of Jonah Lehrer, who was found to have plagiarized articles while at Wired and The New Yorker, and of Benny Johnson, a former BuzzFeed editor who Our Bad Media outed for serial plagiarism over the summer. The campaign against Zakaria has fallen on deafer ears.

Perhaps more of us should care. Plagiarism, Drechsel noted, reflects negatively not just on the offending journalist but on the entire industry.

"I have to say I find it heartbreaking to read yet another serious allegation of plagiarism about yet another prominent journalist," he wrote. "Nothing is more devastating to journalism’s already fragile reputation than instances of journalistic misconduct."