Juan Williams Blames Researcher For Plagiarized Column

Juan Williams Blames Assistant For Plagiarized Column

Fox News pundit Juan Williams has been caught lifting large portions of a Center for American Progress report for a recent column.

Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reported Thursday night that The Hill newspaper had recently revised a Williams piece about immigration reform after it was discovered that whole paragraphs were extremely similar to a CAP study on the subject.

In an interview with Salon, Williams blamed his researcher, who he said gave him what Williams thought were "his words and summaries" of the CAP report.

"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," he said.

It's the second Fox News-related plagiarism episode of the past week. The network previously apologized for a column that lifted huge chunks of text from Politico, blaming it on a "reporting error."

Williams' faulty-notes explanation also echoes that of Fareed Zakaria, who explained his plagiarism scandal in 2012 by saying that he had mistakenly mixed up different notes from different sources.

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