BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Popular CNN host and Time columnist Fareed Zakaria has been suspended from both positions for allegations of plagiarism.

Zakaria was suspended for using parts of a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore in his Time column about gun control without attribution. Zakaria has admitted the lapse in judgment.

Conservative site Newsbusters.org first noticed the similarities in the two stories. Tim Graham of NewsBusters posted part of Zakaria’s Time 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. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

Lepore’s article first appeared in The New Yorker on April 23:

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. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

A website known as Twitchy said there was talk on Twitter that the Zakaria column may have been written by an assistant or intern, and Zakaria didn’t know the work had been lifted.

But Zakaria accepted responsibility on Friday and released a statement of apology saying, according to The New York Times, “Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23 issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”

According to Variety, CNN said, “CNN has suspended Fareed Zakaria while this matter is under review." The suspension’s length had not yet been decided.

Time planned to suspend Zakaria’s column for a month until they could review the situation. Lepore’s work first appeared for The New Yorker, who recently saw staff writer Jonah Lehrer quit after making up quotes from Bob Dylan for a book, according to a Reuters.