Plagiarism: Zakaria, Lehrer, and Anderson

Out of Zakaria, Lehrer, and Anderson, Anderson is the worst case of plagiarism. He literally just copy and pasted words from Wikipedia (which is not a credible source anyway and begs the credibility about the research used for his book in the first place), blog posts, and other books. He tried to validate his “mistake” by saying that he could not find a good citation format and intended those plagiarized texts to be in the footnotes. His story seemed to be made up to try to make himself look less bad under public scrutiny. He also plagiarized other people, while Zakaria and Lehrer mostly plagiarized themselves. With Zakaria, plagiarizing Jill Lepore was not okay, especially since it was almost word for word, but in the instances in which he plagiarized himself, I feel less upset about. I still think that plagiarizing oneself is wrong, as writing original content is a struggle that every writer has, but not every writer plagiarizes and they work hard to be better at their craft instead of taking the easy way out. I am not sure if what Lehrer did with Bob Dylan fit under my definition of plagiarism. Typically, I think of plagiarism as someone stealing someone else’s words or ideas with the thief’s intention of getting away with it. Lehrer’s use of lying to people about the quotes he said he got from Dylan’s representatives is most certainly wrong, as he quite literally put words in someone else’s mouth, a person who is dead and cannot speak for themselves any longer. All three men were wrong in what they did and deserved to be reprimanded, but their degrees of plagiarism were different. Anderson plagiarized a bunch of other sources so I would label him as the worst.