Indian-American journalist and author Fareed Zakaria, who has been suspended by CNN and Time magazine after he admitted to plagiarism, is now accused of publishing without attribution a passage from a 2005 book, a charge he vehemently denied as “totally bogus.”
The new allegation against the 48-year-old Zakaria, levelled by The Washington Post , was, however, refuted by The Daily Beast , which said the author’s book did contain a citation to what he quoted in his 2008 book The Post-American World .
Mr. Zakaria’s book contained a quote from the former Intel Corp chief executive, Andy Grove, about the United States’ economic power, TWP said. It said the first edition of the book, which became a bestseller, made no mention of the comment’s source, nor does a paperback version published in 2009.
In fact, TWP said, Mr. Grove’s comment was published three years earlier in Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Power to the East , by the former Commerce Department official, Clyde V. Prestowitz, who was attached with the Economic Strategy Institute, an eminent think-tank.
However, Mr. Zakaria defended his book. In an interview to TWP, he called the allegation “totally bogus” because the book “is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted.” “People are piling on with every grudge or vendetta,” he said.
Allegations and counter-allegations are flying in the U.S. media after Mr. Zakaria was suspended recently for a month by CNN and Time in the wake of charges that his column about gun laws for Time ’s August 20 issue includes a paragraph that is remarkably similar to one historian Jill Lepore wrote in April for a New Yorker article on the National Rifle Association. Mr. Zakaria apologised for it.
In his interview to The Post , Mr. Zakaria said: “As I write explicitly, this is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted.”
The book contains “hundreds” of comments and quotes that are not attributed because doing so, in context, would “interrupt the flow for the reader,” he said.
He compared his technique to that of other popular non-fiction authors. “Please look at other books in this genre and you will notice that I’m following standard practice,” he said.
*The Washington Post has since issued a correction saying Zakaria did actually cite Prestowitz ( >http://wapo.st/O3XGis ) .
