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Suspended

Fareed Zakaria suspended from TIME Mag for plagiarism

AP

UPDATE: CNN has also suspended Fareed Zakaria indefinitely, according to the Huffington Post.

TIME Magazine has suspended Fareed Zakaria's monthly column, after he plagiarized a paragraph of an April New Yorker piece, Dylan Byers reports:

"TIME accepts Fareed's apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed's column for a month, pending further review."

Newsbusters first reported the plagiarism earlier Friday. In his Aug. 20 column, "The Case for Gun Control," Zakaria writes the following:

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

The paragraph is nearly identical to the following one from Jill Lepore's April New Yorker piece, "Battleground America":

As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America," firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.

Zakaria apologized to Lepore Friday afternoon in a statement to the AtlanticWire.

Michael C. Moynihan, who recently documented quotations fabricated by the New Yorker's Jonah Lehrer, found another instance of plagiarized content in a Zakaria column Friday afternoon. In his May column, Zakaria appears to have lifted a sentence directly from a TIME Magazine article from 1968 on China.

In April, the Washington Free Beacon reported Zakaria was said to be on a short list for a top diplomatic post in a second Obama term.

Published under: Fareed Zakaria , Media