Dear General Public,

I’ve had to speak to you before about your gruesome reverence for dead celebrities. Every famous person who dies is instantly idolized out of all recognition. The same ugly venal toad of a has-been star or notoriously despicable no-talent hack that you were mocking or simply ignoring on Tuesday becomes a beloved secular saint on Wednesday, the second his or her diseased heart stops beating.

This maudlin nonsense really must cease! Your hypocrisy is rank and stinks to heaven! Try to have a modicum of decent self-restraint!

Yours in contempt,

Eileen J.

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As we previously reported, Fareed Zakaria was reinstated by CNN/Time magazine to his post of corporate lackey. But at least one of Zakaria’s colleagues is not happy about it.

About a week ago, Iraq War liar/Palestinian prison camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg accused fellow Iraq War booster Zakaria of even more plagiarism—and not just any plagiarism, but plagiarism of Goldberg’s own interview quotes!

In my previous post, I discussed an incident from 2009 (an incident I had completely forgotten about until it was resurrected by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, among others) in which Fareed Zakaria, who is currently under fire for plagiarizing a paragraph from The New Yorker, lifted, without attribution, two quotations from pieces I had written. I argued that quote-lifting, or quote-theft, is widely considered to be a journalistic sin, and should be considered so. Fareed disagrees, and he e-mailed me this response a few minutes ago (at the time, back in 2009, he didn’t respond, and it didn’t come up in subsequent conversaions [sic] I had with him, mainly because I forgot about it, I think).

Zakaria pled for mercy, saying that it wasn’t his fault that the journalism profession is so horribly corrupt and unethical. He’s just one guy, after all. Just a CNN anchor trying to make an honest living shilling for warmongers, neoliberals and multinationals:

Let me give you the best example from my own work: I have twice interviewed the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. These are tough interviews to set up and take months, something years. The interviews were quoted in hundreds of newspapers and magazines across the world. Less then 10% mentioned my name. So, I would welcome a new journalistic norm that insists that the interviewer always be named. But it’s unfair to castigate me for doing something that is common, if not standard, practice.

Want to know more? Check out Jeffrey Goldberg’s S.H.A.M.E. Profile: