Fareed Zakaria Plagiarism Accusations Persist: ‘Our Bad Media’ Bloggers Claim 26 New Instances

Writers from the media blog “Our Bad Media” have raised more plagiarism accusations against CNN host and veteran journalist Fareed Zakaria.

In a post published Tuesday, anonymous bloggers known only by their Twitter handles as @blippoblappo and @crushingbort outline 26 different instances where Zakaria appears to have copied text from publications such as the New York Times, the Economist and Time from 2011 onward.

“Two dozen episodes of Fareed Zakaria GPS contain content that has been lifted without proper attribution or sourcing -- including one he earned a Peabody for,” the post states, adding that one of the alleged episodes aired two weeks ago.

The authors, who made similar accusations about Zakaria in August, point to more than two dozen cases in which segments from “Fareed Zakaria GPS” -- Zakaria’s CNN foreign affairs show -- contained sentences that were written by other authors in articles for different outlets. Sometimes they include figures without attribution, other times they are word-for-word copies of sentences.

In one case, authors show how Zakaria’s description of a Dutch documentary copied the film’s introduction word-for-word. A YouTube video created by the critics put Zakaria’s broadcast side-by-side to the 2010 documentary called “Justice for Sergei.”

In another example, the bloggers point to an article written by Time’s Leo Cendrowicz in February 2011 on Belgium’s record-breaking 535 days without a government that described how “in Dutch-speaking Flanders, locals handed out free French fries, while in Louvain-la-Neuve, in French-speaking Wallonia, free beer was on offer.”

In a “Fareed Zakaria GPS" broadcast on March 6, 2011, authors say Zakaria said, “in Dutch-speaking Flanders, locals handed out free French fries while in French-speaking Wallonia, you could swig some free beer.”

This isn’t the first time Zakaria has been accused of plagiarism. In August 2012, Time suspended Zakaria after Newsbusters found that an article he wrote on gun control bore strong resemblances to one written in the New Yorker. He later apologized, calling it a “serious lapse.” After Time and CNN investigated the incident, he was reinstated one week later.

In August 2014, “Our Bad Media” published 11 new allegations of plagiarism from his 2008 book, “The Post-American World” and in articles he wrote for Newsweek (prior to IBTMedia's purchase of the magazine) and Foreign Affairs. Zakaria denied the charges in a blog post, saying the alleged instances refer to facts “not someone else’s writing or opinions or expressions.” At the time, the Washington Post called the accusations “reckless,” Poynter reports. Time said it would review Zakaria’s work.

Zakaria, who is an editor at large for Time, a columnist for the Washington Post and was appointed as a contributing editor for Atlantic Media in July, has yet to respond to the latest allegations.