ESPNEWS anchor Will Selva suspended for plagiarism

An anchor for ESPNEWS has been suspended for an undisclosed period of time and has issued an apology after he says he accidentally forgot to add his own content to the words he lifted “virtually verbatim” from an Orange County Register column.

Will Selva, who has been an anchor for the network for three years, said that in his research, he cut and pasted a column by Kevin Ding into his script but somehow neglected to actually write anything to summarize the content. Selva apologized for the incident Wednesday, saying:

“I made a horrible mistake and I’m deeply sorry. I did not live up to my high standards or ESPN’s,” Selva said in the statement. “I sincerely apologize for my sloppiness, especially to Kevin Ding, viewers and colleagues. In my 15 years in broadcast journalism, nothing like this has ever happened and I will make every effort to ensure it won’t happen again.”

Josh Krulewitz, a spokesman for ESPN, said the plagiarism was not a case of Selva deliberately trying to lift the content:

“This is something we take extremely seriously and we’ve taken appropriate action. We looked into how it happened and found that this very bad mistake was made because he should have been more thorough, even on deadline, not because he was intentionally trying to claim someone else’s work as his own.”

ESPN declined to say whether Selva had been disciplined for the incident.