Post corrects report with new Zakaria plagiarism allegation

Zakaria,who was suspended by CNN and Time magazine after he admitted to plagiarism,was accused of publishing without attribution a passage from the 2005 book,a charge vehemently denied by him as “totally bogus”.

The new allegation against 48-year-old Zakaria levelled by Post was,immediately refuted by The Daily Beast,which said the Indian-American author did contain a citation to what he quoted in his 2008 book The Post-American World.

Zakaria’s book contained a quote from former Intel Corp chief executive Andy Grove about the US economic power,the Post said. It said that the first edition of Zakaria’s book,which became a bestseller,made no mention of the comment’s source,nor did a paperback version published in 2009.

In fact,the Post said,Grove’s comment was published three years earlier in Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Power to the East,by former Commerce Department official Clyde V Prestowitz,who is attached with the Economic Strategy Institute,an eminent think tank. However,Zakaria defended his book.

In an interview to the Post he called the allegation “totally bogus” because the book “is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted.” “People are piling on with every grudge or vendetta,” Zakaria told the paper.

Allegations and counter-allegations were flying in the US media after Zakaria was suspended recently for a month by his employers in the wake of charges that his column about gun laws for Time’s August 20 issue included a paragraph that was remarkably similar to one Jill Lepore wrote in April for a New Yorker article on the National Rifle Association. Zakaria apologised for it.