Political analyst and writer Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s GPS and an editor at Time magazine, was suspended by the magazine and the network for plagiarizing several paragraphs from a New Yorker article for use in a recent Time column.
His suspension from Time is for a month, while he has been taken off the air by CNN “indefinitely.”
Zakaria apologized today, saying in a statement that he had made “a terrible mistake.”
“It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault,” he said.
In its own statement, Time spokesman Ali Zelenko said Zakaria’s column would be suspended for a month “pending further review.”
‘‘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,’’ Zelenko said.
‘‘CNN has suspended Fareed Zakaria while this matter is under review,’’ said CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Dargan, who added that Zakaria’s Sunday foreign-affairs program, ‘‘GPS,’’ would be replaced by ‘‘Your Money with Ali Veshi’’ and ‘‘The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.’’
The problem apparently was spotted by media reporters, who noticed similarities between Zakaria’s column on gun control and a gun control article written by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore published in April in The New Yorker magazine.
This is what was in Zakaria’s column: ‘‘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.’’
This was the corresponding passage in Lepore’s New Yorker essay: ‘‘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.’’
