-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.”
Continue reading “
Fareed Zakaria Explains Himself”
Last week the talk of the news cycle centered on yet another “gaffe” by Vice President Joe Biden. In front of an audience half filled with African Americans Biden made the outrageous claim that Republicans want to put blacks “back in chains.” Many left-wingers and Democrats rushed out to defend Biden’s idiocy, but this weekend the Boston Globe parted company with defenders and
Eric Bates, the executive editor of the scintillating, intellectual journal Rolling Stone, wants us to just forget about worrying over Vice President Joe Biden’s constant gaffes. We all “get” Joe, he says, so let’s just ignore his long trail of mistakes and idiotic statements.
Several newspapers have recently announced that far left leaning, non-profit foundations such as The Ford Foundation have given them hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover “the news.” Many wonder if this “coverage” is being programmed by these left-wing moneymen. Others note that the tax-exempt, left-wing foundations are essentially lending U.S. government subsidies once remove to both newspapers and NPR. Is this all merely a way to “save” the news gathering industry, or are left-wing organizations just buying the news and pushing their far left narrative through stealth?
Perhaps in an attempt to prove she isn’t a left-winger after all, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien has found an Obama talking point that she feels quite comfortable slamming. O’Brien finds the spin that Vice President Biden didn’t mean anything by his “put ya’all back in chains” comment is a bit hard to swallow.
So, not only was Bill Clinton officially the
Many on the GOP side of the aisle have been complaining that Mitt Romney seems to be incapable of hitting back against the constant stream of lies, innuendo, and calumny that Obama and his minions have unleashed thus far in this campaign. Romney’s campaign has been a veritable campaign of milquetoastiness by comparison. Yet the Old Media has the gall to claim that there is too much mud slinging going on by both sides.
Politico seems to have decided where it stands on Paul Ryan. On its main page on the afternoon of August 15, the news site seemed to carry a single message: Paul Ryan is a bad, bad man and Romney made a big mistake picking him as his wingman.
Now that Mitt Romney has picked Paul Ryan for his running mate,
On Tuesday’s broadcast of NBC’s Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams and reporter Peter Alexander made to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s first few days on the hustings as Mitt Romney’s new VP pick. And what did they see? They didn’t see the almost universal praise by conservatives and Republicans alike, no, what they saw instead was a “not so warm welcome to the Big Leagues” for Paul Ryan.
As the race for the White House heats up, Reuters suddenly realized that the massive
The most unkind cut of all is when your paper thin understanding of the facts is shredded by someone you think is on your side. This is what happened to Democrat National Committee Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz when she kept trying to tell CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Ryan’s Medicare reform plan took Medicare away from everyone even though, as Blitzer repeatedly pointed out, the truth is that Ryan’s reforms only altered the entitlement for those 55 and younger.
Social Security is as close to insolvency as you can get and not be completely belly up. Government watchdogs warn that
Democrat National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a recent interview that she had “no idea” about the political affiliation of the super PAC that is endorsing Barack Obama. Asked if the group was a Democrat group, she feigned that she didn’t know whether or not they were Democrats despite that the front man for the group, Bill Burton, was once Obama’s White House Deputy Press Secretary.
Now, if you had a story about GOP veep candidate Paul Ryan’s first Iowa rally and an Obama supporter rushed the stage after punching a Romney/Ryan volunteer, would your headline read, “
For The New York Times, reporter Jackie Calmes must have found Chris Matthews’ leg tingle as she penned a story
The Olympics is usually a time of a country to express pride in its athletes, all its athletes. But not for USA Today. No, USA Today thought it would be interesting to
In 2010, stereo equipment magnate Sidney Harmon bought Newsweek for $1. This year his surviving family members ended their support for the magazine. It may have been a good decision since Newsweek can’t even seem to keep its own cover image fresh and original as is witness with an August cover sporting an image and theme that has been used several times before on other magazines.
Rachel Maddow of MSNBC is sure that Mitt Romney’s recent campaign ad is “racist.” How does she know? Well, she can’t point to anything substantive that proves it, so she has to feel that it’s racist and since she feels it, it must be so.
For two straight days, now, neither ABC, CBS, nor NBC have bothered to mention the roiling controversy over the lie-filled ad that Obama’s Super PAC put out intimating that Mitt Romney killed a steel worker’s wife. The ad is being called the nastiest, most misleading ad of this election cycle by newspapers, talk radio and even the cable news stations — CNN and MSNBC both, yet — but thus far the big three are ignoring the whole story.
For the Minneapolis Post, columnist John Reinan has a very
Plainly the long knives are out among the left-media already. All media hands have been called to rush out to cut Rep. Paul Ryan to pieces before he sets one foot on the campaign trail. For Buzzfeed they’ve stooped to using unnamed “sources” to attack Ryan, calling him “no Sarah Palin.” But it’s a strawman argument pushing the left’s narrative.
The leftwing, Old Media has chosen its mode of attack on Paul Ryan: he wants to kill your grandmother. To further that, on CNNs Saturday morning election coverage, Candy Crowley announced that people are “afraid” that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s pick of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan is a “ticket death wish.”
Mark Bittman, a New York Times food critic, admits he used an “inappropriate phrase” in an
U.S. Olympic Hurdler Lolo Jones was slammed by The New York Times as a woman of little accomplishment, a flimsy girl not sufficiently woman’s libby enough, one that is all show and no go and during an August 8 appearance on NBC’s Today, the hurdler broke down in tears wondering why the U.S. media was so ready to tear competitors down instead of supporting our U.S. Olympians?