Reporter Who Smeared The Daily Wire Fired Over Plagiarism Allegations

New York Magazine has cut ties with Ross Barkan, the columnist who lifted the opening of a Washington Post story for his hit piece on the Daily Wire, after a three-month editorial review found 67 of his columns failed to properly credit other writers.

The column that started it all, “Why Ben Shapiro’s Media Empire Is Collapsing,” ran May 14. Within hours, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell posted a side-by-side comparison showing Barkan’s lede nearly matched the opening of Harwell’s own May 9 story on Shapiro and the Daily Wire.

The lede of our Shapiro story on Saturday and the lede of the @NYMag story todayhttps://t.co/P20BkpGhqWhttps://t.co/Ha03RLE3qs pic.twitter.com/64OzrvFcRS

— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) May 14, 2026

“After an independent editorial review, New York found that Ross Barkan did not adhere to our editorial standards, and we have updated 67 columns that did not include proper attribution of language, information, and/or sourcing,” the magazine said in a statement. It added that it would no longer publish his column and apologized “to the writers whose work was not properly attributed.”

Barkan told the New York Post the split was mutual. “We’ve decided to end the column and I send all the best to New York Magazine,” he said. He acknowledged the citation errors without addressing the plagiarism allegations directly. “In the course of nearly 250 pieces, there were times I should have been more careful with my citation. I’m sorry about these errors and will work to do better, more careful work in the future.”

When the allegations first surfaced in May, Barkan called them “all quite ridiculous” in a statement to NPR. The allegations widened days later when NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn ran Barkan’s archive through an AI model and found further passages closely matching work published in The Intercept and Compact Magazine.

The pilfering of @drewharwell’s reporting by @RossBarkan was so egregious, I decided to do another spot check. I ran a random piece of his through an LLM and asked if any verbatim phrases appear in any other publication, and it came back with a hit. He lifted several exact… pic.twitter.com/mjOLIf8ZxB

— Bobby Allyn (@BobbyAllyn) May 15, 2026

He argued that linking to the writers he drew from — and naming them — was credit enough. “I am allowed, as a columnist building on his reporting, to cite facts. Especially when he’s credited,” he wrote of the Compact Magazine piece. He added, “I have written hundreds upon hundreds of columns, essays, and pieces of journalism in my career. I stand by my record.”

His column regularly featured socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who managed Barkan’s failed 2018 Democratic primary bid for a South Brooklyn state Senate seat. “I met him at the end of 2017 when I was running for State Senate in New York City, in Brooklyn, where I grew up. I was strongly contemplating pivoting from journalism to running for office,” Barkan told Current Affairs, a left-wing magazine of politics and culture, in an interview published the day of Mamdani’s inauguration.

Barkan described the campaign as an ideological project. “It was a progressive campaign. It was one that was proudly pro-Palestine, certainly — and I was willing to campaign in mosques and court the neighborhood’s Arab community, which few politicians were willing to do. And so for all those reasons, he hopped on board, and the rest, in its own way, was history. We got to know each other quite well that summer,” he said. Barkan went on to write a book on Mamdani’s rise, The Revolutionary: Zohran Mamdani and the Remaking of American Politics, had been scheduled by Random House for October 6.

As of Saturday, the book appears to have been pulled from Random House’s schedule. Its page on Penguin Random House’s website no longer resolves, and listings at Bookshop.org, BookPal and Target have reverted to the placeholder “Untitled 8221,” credited to “Random House Group.”

Random House did not immediately respond to the Daily Wire’s request for clarification on the book’s status.

Barkan is not leaving journalism. He said he is writing a new column for The Nation, which he said will launch in September.