One of the biggest names in the American foreign policy world, India-born Fareed Zakaria was accused of plagiarism recently— and the attacks followed fast and furious. Why is he so disliked
Isn’t it interesting that when Fareed Zakaria’s little scandal erupted recently so few stood up to defend him in print or on TV? This is, after all, “the most influential foreign policy advisor of his generation”, as Esquire magazine said in 1999, one of the top 100 “global thinkers”, according to Foreign Policy in 2010, “one of the favorite dinner companions of the power elite”, according to The New York Times this week, a past editor of Foreign Affairs and Newsweek and the author of “Why They Hate Us”, a superhit Newsweek cover story right after 9/11 that attempted to explain why Arabs hate America — a man spoken of as a future secretary of state and whose foreign-affairs Rolodex is probably second only to Henry Kissinger’s. In college (Yale and Harvard) those who knew him compared him, not unfavourably, with Kissinger.
It could be said that his famous friends were awaiting a proper survey of the evidence — which, we are told by two of Zakaria’s employers, Time and CNN, indicates that the “plagiarism” in his Time column was a lone aberration. After suspending him briefly, both reinstated him. His weekly world affairs show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS, goes back on air tomorrow.
The show is popular in America. “Looking forward to classes being resumed on Sundays morning,” said a commenter on the Huffington Post site. There was much praise from GPS-watchers, some of whom refused to accept that Zakaria was guilty of copying, inadvertent or not. On the CNN blog where Zakaria also writes, one commenter gushed, “You are so treasured Fareed. Please don’t despair. Everyone makes mistakes. Even the best of us, which is you.” Another said, “Fareed brings multifaceted, non-US centric, well presented and intelligently debated issues” to TV.
And this is partly true. His show, like his writing (three books, one edited collection, dozens of articles), is most certainly US-centric, but it is also well presented and reflects his internationalist interests. Recently, to take a few examples, he had people in to talk about the Wisconsin gurdwara shooting, the God particle, whether Israel would strike Iran, “Can you fool the brain?” and so on — world news (i.e., war or trade) as well as human interest. Hardly an unusual mix.
Now, the naysayers. The alleged plagiarism was uncovered by NewsBusters, a “conservative media watchdog” whose tagline is “Exposing liberal media bias”. So, among the online commenters, while there are those who don’t like Zakaria’s work (example: “Zakaria is a lightweight... He throws softballs to people in power”), the most relentless are the rightwingers. Here’s one: “He likes to verbally urinate on the corpse of our once great culture. He uses soft, reptilian tones and words but he is an enemy of western civilization.” Here’s another: “I hate to sound like that but Foreigners should not be presenting news to Americans. We are NOT them.” Zakaria is a naturalised American citizen who lives in New York.
Those are the extremists. There are saner critics. The New Republic, a liberal magazine, late last year called Zakaria “a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle”. On Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper two weeks ago called him “a consummate player of the ‘Third World card’ against Westerners who dare to criticize his Davos neo-liberalism”. These are blows calculated for maximum impact: at once they attack the man’s work and his personality. Such criticism, even if true, says something about the critics.
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To the plagiarism controversy itself. The trouble blew up over a paragraph in a short column on gun control that Zakaria wrote for Time earlier this month. Zakaria took some information apparently from a book by the law scholar Adam Winkler on gun laws in America. It turns out his paragraph closely resembled one by historian Jill Lepore in a New Yorker piece this April; she had quoted the same bits of Winkler. A couple of other lines are also suspect.
It is hard to believe that a public figure who takes his intellectual reputation seriously could be so shameless. So I am inclined to believe his defence — which followed a prompt and “unreserved” apology on the CNN blog — made to The New York Times last Sunday. He said he had confused his notes of Lepore’s article with his notes of Winkler’s book. He said no research assistant was involved, thus fending off the insinuation that he may not write the copy to which he puts his name, though he added that this year he has begun using an assistant.
He also pled work pressure: “Mr Zakaria said he works on his column ideas each weekend, reports them on Monday, writes on Tuesday and Wednesday and films his Sunday television program on Thursday.” Then there are speaking engagements, at a reported $75,000 a time, and his books, and his role on the boards of think tanks and of Yale University (he resigned three days ago), and his wife and three young children. Zakaria confessed, “There’s got to be some stripping down.”
There have been supporters — notably David Frum, the former George W Bush speechwriter and friend of Zakaria, who wrote strongly in his defence, especially when Washington Post wrongly accused Zakaria of not acknowledging a source in an earlier book (in fact he had done so). That helped, but generally Zakaria’s apology has not fallen on sympathetic ears.
“Blood is in the water and the sharks are circling,” said Joe Klein in a Time blog. Other accusations have been made, such as the fact that two commencement speeches Zakaria gave this year, at the Duke and Harvard graduation ceremonies, are very like each other. They are; but that is not plagiarism. Someone else has said that he ghostwrote a short piece for Zakaria in Newsweek, but that was five paragraphs on “Our Endangered Planet” in what was probably a marketing-led effort by the magazine to capitalise on the Zakaria brand.
Yes, intellectuals as much as lesser beings prefer to hit a man when he is down. But it is as if people were waiting for the fall. Why? If Zakaria is a mere camp follower, then he is no threat. Tunku Varadarajan has written in Newsweek that the attacks are “a hideous manifestation of envy — Fareed Envy”; because Zakaria “is insanely successful by the standards of his profession”.
No doubt. It is true that there is something pushy and arriviste about Zakaria. There is indeed a sometimes unattractive “mix of elitism and banality”, as the New Republic described it. People who know him say he is shrewd and looks to his advantage. On TV he is good because, unlike some anchors, Zakaria lets his guests speak, and they tend to do so in whole sentences. He is a gifted summariser, but not a particularly articulate speaker himself.
If you listen to his commencement speeches, for example, you realise that though he is earnest and wonkish, those qualities are not leavened with a well-developed sense of humour. This gives the impression that he takes himself seriously — too seriously. This, too, is unattractive. The ideal intellectual, the liberal intellectual of the Western tradition, is effortlessly so. Brilliance is not something he ought to be seen to be working at.
And then, sometimes, Zakaria betrays his elite Indian roots. On the well-respected Charlie Rose’s TV show last year, Zakaria said of a left-wing critic of Barack Obama that “I’m not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skillful politicians in the country”.
Dogcatcher! That’s a true-blue subcontinental insult. Zakaria’s pedigree is very blue. His father Rafiq was a scholar and Congress politician in Bombay, his mother Fatima a senior journalist; his three siblings are overachievers in fields like finance and art history. There is no way that the Yale Daily News was right when it said of the former Yalie in 2006 that “His background is more different from Yale than you could imagine. It was not a place that brown-skinned Indian Muslims had a particular tradition, but he took to it perfectly, and it took to him.”
Rubbish. He’s right where he belongs. And he’ll be back at the top in no time.
