-By Warner Todd Huston
Now that his plagiarism tribulations are over, TIME and CNN correspondent Fareed Zakaria has made a few new promises in order to prevent such a mess in the future, the chief of which is he’ll scale back some of his workload.
One of the accusations that was made against Zakaria was that he must have been employing interns to actually write his vast volume of works. It was said that Zakaria must have merely affixed his name to the work of underlings and published them as his own. He must have a ghostwriter and this was the main cause of the plagiarism. But Zakaria refutes that charge.
Zakaria says that he has never had an assistant write a column in 25 years and he’d only begun using a research assistant in the last year. No, the original plagiarism — that of lifting a whole segment of Jill Lepore’s work from an April issue of The New Yorker — was, indeed, his own mistake.
The mistake, he said, occurred when he confused the notes he had taken about Ms. Lepore’s article — he said he often writes his research in longhand — with notes taken from “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” by Adam Winkler (W.W. Norton, 2011), a copy of which was on his desk at his CNN office.
To prevent such “confusion” in the future, Zakaria promises to reduce his arduous schedule a bit, saying: “Other things will have to go away. There’s got to be some stripping down.”
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Fareed Zakaria Explains Himself”
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