Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel*

Juan Williams has been accused of lifting whole paragraphs from a CAP research paper for an article on immigration:

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted — sometimes word for word — from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for the Hill newspaper.

Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor’s note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.”

But that editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem, and not the nearly identical wording that was also fixed.

In a phone interview Thursday evening, Williams pinned the blame on a researcher who he described as a “young man.”

“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.”

So, in response to accusations that he lifted whole paragraphs from a well respected left of center think tank, his defense is that he lifted whole paragraphs from his intern.

Let's also be clear here:  An intern's job is to do research, not write the article.   If you do a word for word copy in the notes, there is nothing wrong with that.  It only becomes a problem when it is transcribed word for word in your article.  (This applies whether you are copying and pasting from a think tank, or from you own f%$#ing intern!)

Let's be clear here. The intern was not listed as a 2^nd author on the article.

Considering his history, condemning the allegations of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas while himself being accused of inappropriate behavior, I was wondering when this sort of sh%$ was going to catch up with him.

Arrogance and stupidity are a toxic mix.

^*I need to note that this turn of phrase was created by Atrios.