Time Magazine to Examine Plagiarism Accusation Against Zakaria

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Time magazine said on Friday afternoon that it was looking into accusations that Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host and Time editor at large, had plagiarized sections of his Aug. 20 column on gun control.

Some passages in Mr. Zakaria's column, “The Case for Gun Control,” closely tracked those in a longer article on guns in America by the historian Jill Lepore in the April 23 issue of The New Yorker. Earlier this year, Mr. Zakaria was criticized for giving a commencement speech at Harvard that was very similar to the one he had earlier given at Duke.

The similar text was spotted by the conservative Web site Newsbusters, and was sped up across the Internet via the media blog JimRomenesko.com.

Mr. Zakaria was out of the country and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Time spokeswoman said in a statement: “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.”