Salon.com is reporting what it calls “a case of apparent plagiarism” by former NPR Correspondent Juan Williams, now a Fox News political analyst.
The site said that Williams lifted “sometimes word for word” from a Center for American Progress (CAP) report, without attribution, for a Hill newspaper column that carried his byline last month. Nearly two weeks after publication the column was revised online, Salon said, and citations to the report were added. A Hill editor’s note told readers of the revisions “to include previously-omitted attribution” to CAP.
Williams told Salon that a researcher was to blame.
“I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams said. “I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn’t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.”
Hugo Gurdon, the editor in chief of the Hill, told Salon it was “an honest mistake.”
Williams landed a full-time job at Fox News after he was dismissed by NPR in October 2010 following controversial remarks he made on Fox regarding Muslims. His ouster put NPR in a political bull’s-eye just before the elections that year, and lead to the departures of NPR News Chief Ellen Weiss and NPR President Vivian Schiller.
“An honest mistake”? Williams should have been fired except he’s a right-wing pundit mouthing right-wing talking points from right-wing think tanks on a right-wing news channel.