You raise a good point. Like Princeton, Middlebury does have a stringent honor code, and I’ve had a couple of students suspended for an academic year for violating it by plagiarizing someone else’s work. But in those cases there was no doubt the student was guilty. I’m not trying to absolve Zakaria, but I don’t think I fully understand enough about the circumstances of his case to render a judgment. But it may be that, as you implicitly suggest, I’m being too lenient toward him.

I’m not sure I’m defending him so much as empathizing with his situation. I really have no basis for doing more than that. I agree with you: the higher up the person in the media food chain, the farther people would like to see them fall.