MEGAN MCARDLE: Fareed Zakaria And The Mysteries Of Plagiarism.

Journalism has only a few “capital crimes” — offenses where a single instance can kill your career. In fact, plagiarizing and making up quotes or facts are the only two I can think of. They often get lumped in together, but as I’ve been reading and thinking about the accusations of plagiarism against Fareed Zakaria, the differences between them have loomed large.

Making up facts or quotes is pretty clearly a crime against the reader, and possibly against the subject, depending on whether the quotes make them sound bad. The journalist is using the credibility of his or her position to get people to believe something that isn’t true. That untrue thing may be trivial — what’s possibly most remarkable about Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications is how minor and unnecessary they often were — but that doesn’t alter the fact that you have deliberately gotten someone to believe a lie.

Plagiarism is a completely different sort of crime, but we often treat it as similar. When someone is caught plagiarizing, the editors often write solemn notes, apologizing to the reader. And yet, in most of these cases, the overwhelming majority of readers don’t care.

And, probably, neither will anyone else if you hold the right connections and views. “There is something to see here, but we’re not sure what it is. And maybe — because it is Zakaria, and not some young unknown — we don’t want to look too closely.”