Bloggers call out CNN for double standard on Fareed Zakaria

The pseudonymous bloggers @blippoblappo and @crushingbort deliver withering criticism of CNN in a guest piece on Esquire.com.

The piece, titled “CNN does not get to cherrypick the rules of journalism,” rips the news network for its double standard in standing by Fareed Zakaria despite extensive documentation on the Our Bad Media blog of plagiarism by Zakaria. Earlier this year, the bloggers noted, CNN fired a news editor for multiple instances of plagiarism. “In its statement announcing her firing, CNN trumpeted its standards of ‘trust, integrity, and simply giving credit where it’s due.'” But, beyond a dismissive statement last month when Our Bad Media published the first of three posts documenting 45 instances of apparent plagiarism, CNN has ignored the accusations against one of its biggest stars.

I won’t repeat much detail here of the Esquire piece, though I encourage you to read it (and I thank my pseudonymous friends for their mention of me). However, these three points stand out:

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Attribution, quotation marks and links: They turn plagiarism into research

How And Why Lying About Plagiarism Is Bad – A Response To Fareed Zakaria And Fred Hiatt https://t.co/LPYcircje5 via Our Bad Media

— reckless blupman (@blippoblappo) August 20, 2014

I have said multiple times here that attribution is the difference between plagiarism and research.

I also have said many times that linking is a matter of journalism ethics and that if journalists were expected to link to their digital sources, editors would prevent plagiarism more effectively and detect it more quickly.

Fareed Zakaria apparently did more research than attribution in some of his work for Time, CNN and the Washington Post. And his failure to link to sources — and his newsrooms’ failure to demand links — has damaged his credibility as a journalist, however this latest accusation plays out.

The media watchdogs who caught Buzzfeed editor Benny Johnson plagiarizing, known only as @blippoblappo and @crushingbort, have documented a dozen cases of apparent plagiarism by Zakaria. All of the incidents they cite occurred prior to the 2012 incident when Zakaria was suspended for plagiarizing the work of the New Yorker’s Jill LePore.

His employers then said they reviewed his previous work, satisfying themselves that the theft was, in the words of Time’s official statement, “an isolated incident.” On their Our Bad Media blog, the watchdogs say that they needed only “less than an hour and a few Google searches” to find a dozen examples of Zakaria using verbatim passages or lightly rewritten passages from other news sources. So they rightly question how rigorously Zakaria’s employers reviewed his work, a question Craig Silverman raised in 2012.

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