More on Zakaria…

Politico’s Dylan Byers writes about the latest Zakaria developments…

Their hardest challenge, Blappo and Bort say, is CNN, where Zakaria hosts “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a Sunday program focusing on international affairs. To date, Our Bad Media has leveled 26 accusations of plagiarism against Zakaria’s CNN work. The examples presented include sentences and, in some cases entire, paragraphs that appear to have been borrowed from sources like The New York Times, The Economist and The New Yorker, among others, often with slight tweaks to the language or grammar. Throughout, the network has been unshakeable, with president Jeff Zucker expressing “complete confidence” in his Sunday show host.

“Without serious, serious pressure from other journalists, we doubt that CNN will take any action,” Blappo and Bort said in a series of email exchanges.

“As an organization, they’ve ignored any new developments while sticking to their original statements,” Blappo and Bort said. “They’ve committed themselves far too deeply to defending Zakaria’s brand to turn back now. Jeff Zucker has publicly expressed support for Zakaria, and Brian Stelter whitewashed the whole deal on Reliable Sources. What will be interesting to see is how they will manage cover future plagiarism stories without the appearance of a glaring double standard.”

(snip)

“The corrections are necessary. The question is are they sufficient?” Frank Sesno, the former CNN Washington bureau chief and director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, wrote in an email. “I have great respect for Fareed’s intellect and journalistic perspective. But due to negligence, because he had too many projects on his plate or as a result of some very serious problems in how he worked, he got into trouble with copy that was not his and was not attributed. Correcting and explaining is the very least that news organizations — and Fareed — should do.”

“What we’re seeing is a pattern, on a bunch of different platforms and a bunch of different properties,” said Kelly McBride, he vice president for academic programs of The Poynter Institute. “When you line them up, it looks bad.”