Every so often, Washington punditry momentarily goes into crisis mode when one of its own is found to have committed plagiarism. Last summer, it was Fareed Zakaria. Today, it’s Fox News pundit Juan Williams, whose recent column on immigration reform in The Hill newspaper contained passages lifted from a report by the liberal Center for American Progress. Williams said it wasn’t his fault, but that of an assistant who failed to attribute the relevant passages: “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 told Salon. “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.” OK. But let’s be clear about what’s going on here, because the traditional definition of plagiarism – adopting another writer’s words as your own – doesn’t really apply to cases like this. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
