Juan Williams Uses Work Unattributed, Blames Assistant

Juan Williams has had to admit that a recent column he wrote contained full sections of a report by the liberal Center for American Progress and that he failed to attribute the source.

Williams used CAP’s work, in some cases word-for-word, in a February 18 column on immigration but failed to note that the information came from the liberal advocacy group.

When Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald initially reported the incident, Williams blamed an assistant for the omission.

On March 7, Williams said that a “young man” in his office gave him the information from the CAP report but Williams claimed he thought it was his assistant’s work and he included it in his own piece on that basis. “I had never seen the CAP report myself,” Williams said.

On Twitter, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress criticized Williams for lifting CAP’s work.

“Fox pundit Williams justifies cribbing @amprog report by saying “It’s just the data” he lifted. Guess he’ll need Megyn Kelly to investigate,” Podesta jabbed.

The editor of The Hill told Salon that he accepted Williams’ explanation for lifting CAP’s work without attribution.

Hugo Gurdon, the editor in chief of The Hill, said that Williams “gave me an explanation, which I found satisfactory. And I believe there was an honest mistake and it related to the transfer of copy and the use of a researcher and it was completely inadvertent.”

The original piece on The Hill now sports an update that reads, “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.”