The celebrity journalist was suspended from Time and CNN over trumped-up charges of plagiarism—and then quickly reinstated. Why the public lynching reeks of envy.
Fareed
Zakaria’s prominence as an American journalist began in the days after
Mohamed Atta and his murderous band laid waste to the World Trade
Center. Then on Newsweek’s payroll, Zakaria wrote a cover story for the magazine—titled “Why Do They Hate Us?”—which
examined the roots of Islamist rage and catapulted him to intellectual
celebrity. In the past few days, as one observed his confreres in the
American media slobber and snarl for his blood after an act of
plagiarism so trivial that one had to marvel at the disproportion
between the journalistic lapse and the cyclonic castigation, one was
tempted to ask this question, in echo of his first resounding shot: “Why
Do They Hate Fareed?” One must also ask a question of two of Zakaria’s
employers, Time and CNN, both of whom suspended him with unseemly
haste, as throngs with pitchforks gathered outside their gates: “Why
Were You So Spineless?” Both reinstated him within days of the
suspension after internal inquiries into his work; which leads one to
ask why they didn’t wait until after their inquiries before smiting him
so publicly. His reputation was tarred: he was in favorable
consideration by Team Obama for the post of national-security adviser.
That will not, now, happen.
Why do they hate Fareed? What one has seen in the past few days
can only be described as a hideous manifestation of envy—Fareed Envy.
Henry Kissinger’s aphorism about academia (where the “politics are so
vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”) applies with
delicious tartness to journalism, where media reporters of the kind who
hounded Zakaria occupy the lowest rung and exult at the prospect of
pulling people down. Zakaria, by contrast, is insanely successful by the
standards of his profession: he has a TV show to which few people of
any prominence would refuse an invitation, plus columns at Time, CNN.com, and The Washington Post.
He also writes academic-lite books that presidents clutch as they
clamber aboard planes, and gives speeches at—it is said—$75,000 a pop.
He is as much a brand as he is a journalist: he has “inc.” in his veins.
It’s lonely at the top. As the traditional news media shrivel and
other platforms proliferate, celebrity public intellectuals like
Zakaria (think, also, of Tom Friedman and David Brooks) become the only
bankable resource left. Recognizable across all the mediums, the branded
few become mini-industries unto themselves. Simultaneously, a huge
cloud of excluded people, regular civilians and workaday journalists
alike, can now respond on the Internet, many of them resentful that
their voices go unheard while the Zakarias loom ever larger. So they
pick over every word. For celebrity journalists, equally, a potent
pressure has grown: the pressure to stay aloft at 40,000 feet, to stay
prolific, and flawless. Zakaria must project omniscience to survive: so
he writes short and long, on everything from al Qaeda to American gun
control, the topic on which he was tripped up by the plagiarism
McCarthyites. So he cribbed a little: he read a lot; took notes; things
got jumbled. Is that worth a man’s career? I think not, and to his
credit he thought not too. One admires him for fighting back, especially
as those who called for his head were so pious, and yet so inhumane.
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