On Monday Newsweek placed an editor’s note on Fareed Zakaria’s entire archive for the magazine. It says, “some of his articles have been the subject of complaints claiming that they contain material that should have been attributed to others.”
The anonymous critics @blippoblappo and @crushingbort published a post Aug. 22 outlining what they said were instances of plagiarism in Zakaria’s 2008 book “The Post-American World” and in Newsweek and Foreign Affairs.
Reached by phone, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Jim Impoco said simply, “The examples I saw were clearly enough for me to append a note.”
Impoco also took issue with the now-kind-of-bruited claim that he hadn’t answered a previous request for comment from Poynter about Zakaria articles that Newsweek published before he was editor and when a different company owned the magazine.
On Aug. 22, I contacted Foreign Affairs and W.W. Norton, which published “The Post-American World.” My coworker Ben Mullin emailed The Atlantic, where Zakaria was recently named a contributing editor, and Kate Gardiner, IBT’s director of social media and audience engagement, to ask if she’d pass on a message to Impoco that Poynter wanted comment. Gardiner confirms she forwarded him that message, but Impoco said he had expected to see a followup message from Poynter after that.
So just an update for those keeping score on this game of inside baseball: Newsweek and Poynter have now talked after Poynter first launched that star-crossed search for comment. No reply from Norton or Foreign Affairs yet. Poynter has been in touch with Atlantic Media, but it hasn’t yet offered any comment.
