Time, CNN Suspend Zakaria After He Admits "Terrible Mistake"

UPDATE: That didn't take long. Time magazine moved quickly to suspend columnist Fareed Zakaria for one month after he apologized Friday for lifting material from a New Yorker essay.

Here's the official statement from Time spokesman Ali Zelenko, via the AtlanticWire: "TIME accepts Fareed's apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed's column for a month, pending further review."

CNN followed suit roughly an hour later, suspending the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS: "We have reviewed Fareed Zakaria’s Time column, for which he has apologized. He wrote a shorter blog post on CNN.com on the same issue which included similar unattributed excerpts. That blog post has been removed and CNN has suspended Fareed Zakaria while this matter is under review."

Friday, August 10: Time magazine's Fareed Zakaria apologized Friday for apparently borrowing heavily from a New Yorker article without attribution in his column on gun control this week, a journalistic misdeed he called a "serious lapse" and a "terrible mistake."

Here's his statement, via the the New York Times: "Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers."

Zakaria's journalistic missteps were first flagged earlier Friday by conservative media watchdog Newsbusters.

Here's one example of the similarities between Zakaria's column and Jill Lepore's New Yorker essay.

Zakaria in "The Case for Gun Control":

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

And Lepore in "Battleground America":

As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.

Alexander Abad-Santos has rounded up a few more of the passages in question over at the AtlanticWire. Prior to Zakaria's apology, a Time spokesperson offered this to the website: "Time takes any accusation of plagiarism by any of our journalists very seriously, and we will carefully examine the facts before saying anything else on the matter."