First Time magazine and now CNN have suspended reporter Fareed Zakaria after he was caught cribbing entire paragraphs of a Time article on gun control from a Jill Lepore piece in the New Yorker about the NRA.
The suspension is expected to last at least a month for Time, says The New York Times. CNN has yet to specify how long their suspension will last.
Blogger Tim Graham of Newsbusters was one of the first to ring the warning bell, pointing to a pargraph from Zakaria's "The Case for Gun Control," which ran in Time's August 20 issue:
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."
Compare that to Jill Lepore's "Battleground America," which ran in The New Yorker on April 23:
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at UCLA., 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, when confronted with the plagarism, issued an apology about two hours later — but that wasn't enough for Time.
"Time accepts Fareed's apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists," said Time spokeswoman Ali Zelenko in a written statement. "As a result, we are suspending Fareed's column for a month, pending further review."
About an hour after being suspended by Time, CNN got on board, issuing a sternly-worded statement of their own:
We have reviewed Fareed Zakaria’s Time column, for which he has apologized. He wrote a shorter blog post on CNN.com on the same issue which included similar unattributed excerpts. That blog post has been removed and CNN has suspended Fareed Zakaria while this matter is under review.
