Integrity is an important aspect of society and an essential one for journalism. People who become journalists join a long-standing agreement with readers and viewers and listeners in trust. The public has faith in the media, and the media must, in turn, respect and honor that trust and not abuse its power.
Fareed Zakaria, a CNN host and Time editor-at-large, broke that trust when he plagiarized in a Time magazine column on gun control, an act he admitted to on Friday.
He has rightly been suspended by both CNN and Time, and readers will probably question the validity of his future — and past — articles, as well as those by both entities. Zakaria, who before this incident appeared to be a great journalist with valuable insight, deserves a second chance.
He should not be fired and certainly not be used as a scapegoat for an industrywide problem. Yes, Zakaria is completely at fault for borrowing, without attribution, from a piece in The New Yorker, but he is by no means the only one culpable. It was a failure of not just Zakaria but the journalism industry evolving in this digital age.
We expect more from Time, CNN and the mainstream media as a whole. There is an expectation that articles go through standard editing and fact-checking processes: How is it that this was not caught? How many other people out there are plagiarizing and not getting caught?
This failure is one of several of late that goes far beyond Zakaria and Time Warner, the conglomerate that owns CNN and Time. A writer with The New Yorker resigned on July 30 after a series of plagiarism incidents. When the Supreme Court delivered its ruling on President Obama’s health care law, both CNN and Fox News, in a rush to deliver the news first, initially reported that the individual mandate was struck down.
Journalists need to take a deep breath and slow down. It’s not about being first — it’s about being right. Only in extreme cases does breaking news a few minutes before a competitor make any significant difference. A well-researched, original article is undoubtedly superior to a hastily written but earlier-published one, plagiarism or not. And laziness should never be accepted when fastidiousness is a viable option.
Part of being a journalist is questioning the ethics of others, whether it be heads of state or a face on the street. It is therefore essential that journalists hold themselves to the highest ethical standard. Plagiarism delegitimizes news, and a journalism industry with integrity is a must in society.
The fact that anyone can get caught plagiarizing is a lesson for students as well. The consequences for plagiarism here at UC Berkeley are especially harsh and can be detrimental to future academic and professional endeavors.
Don’t take the lazy, easy way out — not in school, not in journalism. Not at all.
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If you can’t do the time, don’t do…..
Zero tolerance. One and done.
Remarkable. An ode to hypocrisy.
Since when do the editors of the Daily Californian care a twit about fact checking? Read any article on Israel and you’ll quickly realize they care less about facts than they do about demonizing the only country in the Middle East where decency, respect for the common law, respect for the individual, respect for common values matters.
Brings to mind george Orwell’s quote, “During times of universal deceit the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” It is clear the editors of this periodical speak the language of deceit.
It does not reassure me when the editors of the Daily Cal refer to plagiarizing as “borrowing”, and then try to blame someone other than Fareed for the incident. I agree that we should give Fareed a second chance, but that second chance should come in a department where he won’t plagiarize. Put him in the obituaries or classifieds department.
Zakaria should be fired or quit just the way the New Yorker columnist who plagiarized resigned because he knew if he didn’t, he would have been given his walking papers by the magazine. If appropriately harsh penalties are not applied to journalists who cheat, others will be tempted to play hard and fast with the truth and steal from others, usurping other writers’ work for their own.
In the past, plagiarists have gotten away with it. The author of the ballyhooed book “Roots,” Alex Haley, was convicted of stealing a good deal of the text for that book from another author and reached a court settlement by paying the true author several thousand dollars. Haley nevertheless made a couple of million for his pilfering of this material and was never condemned by the press–possibly because he was an African American with a background in journalism and the true author of the semi-fictitious “The Autobiography of Malcom X.”
I remember Zakaria was so simpleminded when it came to the issue of Gaza, reducing the Israelis as villains and the Palestinian thugs who fired missiles at Israeli towns as “understandable” for their murderous actions.
Sooner or later, these pathetic excuses for journalists get found out or show themselves for what they are. The late Alexander Cockburn in the ’70′s appeared fixated on demonizing Israel. And then the Village Voice found he was getting money from a Saudi/Emirates “stink tank” and fired his sorry ass.
Wait, are you saying Fareed deserves another chance because his editors should have read a competing magazine first and then should have caught his deception? With that kind of logic, every Cal student ever charged with plagiarism ought to get another chance because their TAs should have read papers from Stanford and UCLA and caught the plagiarism before their papers were turned in. I also wonder if maybe the DC is cutting Fareed some extra slack because he’s not white or Jewish. Are non-white journalists held to a lower standard?