{"id":4076,"date":"2013-03-12T07:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T12:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4076"},"modified":"2013-03-12T07:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T12:01:00","slug":"pump-up-the-jams-pump-it-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4076","title":{"rendered":"Pump up the jam, pump it up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Fig.1: Pump it up.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Timorous airline passenger<\/a> and\u00c2\u00a0Fox News alleged liberal\u00c2\u00a0Juan Williams has admitted to making one of his weekly columns an undergraduate copy paste job.\u00c2\u00a0 According to Salon<\/a>‘s Alex Seitz-Wald:<\/p>\n

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted \u00e2\u20ac\u201d sometimes word for word \u00e2\u20ac\u201d from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for the Hill newspaper.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s note that read: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p>\n

But that editor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s note mentions only the attribution problem, and not the nearly identical wording that was also fixed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The really strange thing about this case is what it reveals about the writing and thinking process of the two-million dollar a year Fox News pundit:<\/p>\n

In a phone interview Thursday evening, Williams pinned the blame on a researcher who he described as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153young man.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I 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<\/strong>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Williams told Salon. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two things.\u00c2\u00a0 First, he has an assistant?\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve always suspected assistants were behind the obscure factoids and misleading statistics in George Will’s work (full disclosure–someone, I’ll find out later who, made this very same quip, I’m borrowing), but Williams’ defense makes that clear.\u00c2\u00a0 Second, and more importantly, Williams\u00c2\u00a0confesses to\u00c2\u00a0his hacktackular thought process.\u00c2\u00a0 He has an idea, then sends someone else out to provide data that “pumps it up.”\u00c2\u00a0 It’s almost as if he had reached a conclusion, then dispatched a lackey to find him some premises.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s the master chef of ideas, some underpaid assistant can chop up the ideas and cook the facts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Timorous airline passenger and\u00c2\u00a0Fox News alleged liberal\u00c2\u00a0Juan Williams has admitted to making one of his weekly columns an undergraduate copy paste job.\u00c2\u00a0 According to Salon‘s Alex Seitz-Wald: In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted \u00e2\u20ac\u201d sometimes word for word \u00e2\u20ac\u201d from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing … Continue reading Pump up the jam, pump it up<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1611,1610,912,129,580,843,404],"class_list":["post-4076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-alex-seitz-wald","tag-center-for-american-progress","tag-fox-news","tag-george-will","tag-hacks","tag-juan-williams","tag-plagiarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4076"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4079,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4076\/revisions\/4079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}