Ira Stoll on Fareed Zakaria's True Intellectual Sin

Piling on to the story of Fareed Zakaria runs counter to some of Ira Stoll's favorite journalistic rules.

Never make too big a deal of a plagiarism story, for one thing—given the number of words that pass through most journalists' computers nowadays, and the difficulty sometimes of remembering exactly where you learned that fact or phrase, it's a wonder there aren't more cases.

And kick them while they are up, not when they are down, for another thing. "My contrarian instincts," writes Stoll, "are summoning me to defend the now-embattled Mr. Zakaria rather than join in the flurry of attacks."