After CNN chief Jeff Zucker said he had “complete confidence” in CNN’s Fareed Zakaria even after at least 24 instances of plagiarism on his Fareed Zakaria GPS show had been discovered, a prominent journalism professor said he had no doubts that Zakaria is a serial plagiarizer.
On Wednesday, Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said he had “complete confidence that Zakaria is a plagiarist” after he saw Zucker’s supportive comments.
@mlcalderone I have complete confidence that Zakaria is a plagiarist. Unfortunately. @jayrosen_nyu
— Dan Kennedy (@dankennedy_nu) September 24, 2014
After Our Bad Media discovered numerous more instances in which Zakaria plagiarized for his CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, Politico, Esquire, and The Week also weighed in this week and slammed Zakaria as a serial plagiarizer, as Breitbart News has been documenting.
While Zakaria’s elite allies in the mainstream press give him a pass and ignore his offenses, Our Bad Media has not let him off the hook. After finding yet another article Zakaria plagiarized (an article about martinis), Our Bad Media declared, “Fareed Zakaria was, is, and will be a massive plagiarist in what some in older times may have called the most extreme example of plagiarism we’ve ever seen by major news organizations.”
On Wednesday, Our Bad Media revealed that “Zakaria’s February 1998 Slate column, ‘Toward The Wet Martini’ rips off “Max Rudin’s ‘There Is Something About A Martini’ in the July/August 1997 issue of American Heritage.”
The duo at Our Bad Media found at least six major instance of alleged plagiarism:
- Zakaria lifts Rudin’s passage that in the 19th century, cocktails were known as morning “eye-openers.”
- While Rudin says the martini “acquired…a glamorous mystique” in the post-war era, Zakaria thinks it “acquired an air of mystery and glamour.”
- Rudin states that FDR, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nick Charles–a fictional character from the novel and movie The Thin Man–enjoyed a martini.
- Fareed Zakaria not only mentions all the same people, but appears to have gotten the impression from Rudin’s article that Nick Charles, among “the most debonair men of the time,” was a real person who appeared in a movie.
- Zakaria also uses Rudin’s note on FDR’s preference for a teaspoon of olive brine.
- Zakaria somehow stumbles onto the same idea that the martini came to represent modernism and that the person to validate that quote was Paul Desmond of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Where would he ever get that idea (and the same language to express it)?
They made the discovery after Jacob Weisberg, who runs Slate, accused Our Bad Media of being “silly” and “totally off base” with their plagiarism allegations against Zakaria even as Politico, Esquire, the Week, and prominent journalism professors condemned Zakaria.
Our Bad Media wondered whether Weisberg “proceeded to completely ignore or address anything we actually posted, including articles that were lifted verbatim and unaccredited mistakes that Zakaria could only have made by taking someone else’s words,” because “Zakaria used to write for Slate when Weisberg served as editor-in-chief, or because Zakaria featured the book Weisberg co-wrote with Bob Rubin on Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
CNN chief Jeff Zucker, though, still continues to have “complete confidence” in him even as he makes him unavailable to the network’s top media reporter. Zakaria was suspended in 2012 after he was caught extensively plagiarizing a New Yorker article, and CNN and other outlets he wrote for claimed they had not found any other instances of plagiarism. They apparently did not look thoroughly enough, because Our Bad Media has found all of their examples after Zakaria was reinstated.