Deciding which of the three cases, Zakaria, Lehrer or Anderson, I thought was the worst was rather difficult. However, after a lot of thought, I concluded that Anderson’s case was the worst and Zakaria’s was the least objectionable. I chose Anderson’s case as the worst because he blatantly copied from other sources and used sentences verbatim. I don’t see how this could have been a genuine mistake. If he knew that he used so much information word for word from other sources and was trying to be professional about using it, he would have made sure to have gone back and cited them correctly. There is no way he could have read over his piece and not realize they were not his own words after “deleting the footnotes.” Whether it was a mistake or not, he had a great deal of obvious plagiarism in his writing.
Although I chose Anderson for the worst case, Lehrer was close to being chosen for the fact that he faked quotes which is a very big deal. I do not think that plagiarizing your own work should be considered plagiarizing because they are your own words. The fake quotes are what makes his scenario pretty serious. Even if the quotes he made up were not putting the other person in harm’s way, he is still putting words into that person’s mouth which is a big no-no in journalism. He also had originally lied about having fake quotes by saying they were from an archival interview. I can understand that he panicked and lied, but he did still lie originally. Still by explaining the severity of this case, I am unsure whether his or Anderson’s was the worst.
Lastly, I think Zakaria’s was the least objectionable because although he did plagiarize, he did not have anything word for word from the source. He did however, come clean and apologized with no excuses which I found respectable, compared to Anderson who just made excuses as to why he did it or Lehrer originally lying about it. Overall, I do believe that Zakaria and Anderson plagiarized based off of my understanding of the concept of plagiarism. I do not believe Lehrer plagiarized, but he did do something seriously bad by using fake quotes in his writing.
Beth Mackey 