
Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes - kevinalexbrown
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/jonah-lehrer-resigns-from-new-yorker-after-making-up-dylan-quotes-for-his-book/?hp
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tptacek
Just in case you're skimming: this comes at the end of a bit of a saga for
Lehrer, who had also been discovered "plagiarizing himself", recycling
significant chunks of previously-published work in new New Yorker pieces. No
doubt there's been a fine-toothed comb running through everything he's done
since that first story broke.

~~~
alecco
At the same time Gladwell (another New Yorker writer) was exposed for being a
corporate shill, something quite more serious. Nothing happened.

~~~
tptacek
No, being a "corporate shill" is not "quite more serious" than fabricating
quotes.

~~~
Alex3917
"No, being a 'corporate shill' is not 'quite more serious' than fabricating
quotes."

How do you figure? Do you actually think that corporate shills cause less harm
to society than people fabricating a few (largely inconsequential) quotes?

~~~
awj
> Do you actually think that corporate shills cause less harm to society than
> people fabricating a few (largely inconsequential) quotes?

If I'm allowed to parenthetically assume that the shilling also is "largely
inconsequential", then yes, it causes less harm.

~~~
Alex3917
If you actually look at the quotes made up by most of these journalists, they
are mostly things about the weather that day and the color of the house or
whatever. Look at the actual quotes from the Jason Blaire scandal, it's all
completely trivial stuff.

On the other hand, it's hard to argue that cigarettes aren't actually
dangerous, since they kill around 500,000 Americans per year.

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hammock
The full AP story has more info at the bottom.
[http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEB7lzn2h8...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEB7lzn2h8-Y8ZyDXVSZufv4IAwA?docId=fb00ecb8ff464a86b5e32e879211d5aa)

 _Among Lehrer's inventions was a quote that first appeared in the famous
documentary from the mid-1960s, "Don't Look Back," in which Dylan tells a
reporter about his songs that "I just write them. There's no great message."
In "Imagine," Lehrer adds a third sentence — "Stop asking me to explain" —
that does not appear in the film.

According to Tablet, Lehrer also invented quotes on how Dylan wrote "Like a
Rolling Stone" and, when confronted about them, alleged that he had been
granted access to an uncut version of "No Direction Home," a Dylan documentary
made by Martin Scorsese. Lehrer now says he never saw such footage._

Still curious to see a full account of all the Dylan quotes in question.
Anyone have it?

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ajross
I have no idea. But I'm all but certain they'll turn out to be perfectly
banal, expected things that Dylan certainly "could have" said. People don't
invent or plagiarize blogbuster news. The cheat on the dumb stuff that no one
will bother to check.

Not to defend Lehrer exactly, but this is a kind of situation where hackers
don't have a lot of experience to draw on to aid interpretation. It's not
possible to "cheat" your way to working software. But in the world of
journalism, it really is possible to fill out an article based on nothing but
a little creativity. Combine that with the severe time and performance
pressure these people can be under, and the temptation to cheat must be
immense.

~~~
danso
This is a great point. I'm a working programmer and journalist...In the latter
profession, there is no greater, clear-cut sin than making things up. The
second is to not plagiarize...but what constitutes plagiarism can differ among
different opinion-holders.

I can't think of a ethical parallel in programming. I mean, there's copying of
proprietary code but that's also a criminal violation. Plagiarism and
fabrication can be done without incurring criminal charges, but it's basically
the end of a career in journalism.

The point is that even though these transgressions seem minor in quantity, for
a professional journalist to have justified committing them requires either a
total burst of sudden professional insanity...or a long, undiscovered history
of other transgressions.

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electronous
I would argue that passing insecure systems off as secure, like what we saw
with Tesco today, would count as unethical. That's a case where you can cut
corners and nobody might notice for a while, and the system in question
seemingly works.

~~~
danso
Yes, I agree that would be unethical and _should_ be a career-killer. But
that's a decision arguably made possible by several layers of incompetent
management, not just one manager or coder. Higher-level managers can say that
they aren't expected to know of the technical details. And coders can blame
the result on legacy systems that they had to interact with. The buck does not
stop as cleanly at one person as it does in the case of the writer who
plagiarizes/fabricates.

Moreover, journalistic writing is very public. Your byline is attached to a
piece that was seen by at least a few hundred, if not hundreds of thousands of
people. If you get called out on fabrication/plagiarism, well, people are
going to know about it. Editors and proofreaders rarely get called out by name
for mistakes. But that's irrelevant, since an editor/proofreader isn't really
in the position to fabricate/plagiarize in a writer's piece...they're there to
edit/fix/separate-the-chaff-from-the-wheat-and-keep-the-chaff

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dmazin
My favorite part of this mess is that Jad Abumrad (one of the two guys behind
Radiolab which, I think, is extremely messy with its science) called the
initial ousting of Lehrer when he recycled passages a "cheap moral
crusade."[1]

[1]: <https://twitter.com/jadabumrad/status/218042197826732033>

~~~
phillmv
To be fair, the "self plagiarizing" thing got way out of hand.

It's a little bit not cool to not tell your audience that you've recycled some
of your own columns. But… at the time I really didn't see any grounds for all
the cries of lèse majesté.

~~~
ghaff
Agreed. Reasonably large chunks of material in A-list pubs was probably over
the line of accepted practice. But way, way different from plagiarizing
someone else or making stuff up. In general, I don't find anything especially
wrong with _judiciously_ reusing material. If I've explained XYZ tech in an
article in the past, I may well cut-and-paste that paragraph, reworking it a
bit for flow, if I need the same explanation again. Similarities might well be
sufficient to be called plagiarism if it were someone else I cut-and-pasted.

That said, I would be a lot more conservative in the case of a commissioned
article from a major publication.

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misiti3780
I understand that making up quotes is illegal and unethical but is using prior
work acceptable as long as you cite it (I'm not a journalist)

~~~
mdm_
I'm not sure I understand how anyone can plagiarize themselves either. Isn't
that just called "recycling your own material"? For example, several parts of
David Foster Wallace's speech/book _This Is Water_ are pretty much verbatim
from _Infinite Jest_. Or what about authors who are pushing ideologies and
repeat themselves a lot? For example, there's a lot of overlap between Ayn
Rand's novels _Atlas Shrugged_ and _The Fountainhead_. Isn't this just what
writers do?

~~~
amritamaz
I think the problem was that his deal with the New Yorker meant he would
create original work for them. I'm sure it's okay when they are your own books
that you sell to publishers, and the publishers are aware of the overlap in
content, but in this case he was supposed to be writing new, original pieces
for the New Yorker.

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credo
It is interesting that this duplicate submission (submitted 14 minutes after
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314048> ) is on the front page, while
the original submission only has one upvote :)

 _[edit]: response to th0ma5: As the smiley and the comment should have made
clear - this is not a matter of anyone being "too upset" about anything (and
you th0ma5 were the only person investigating and talking about karma :)

Btw in spite of the downvotes, the comment is back in positive territory, so
presumably, other people disagree with your comments about what is OT

As for the title, the NYT headline doesn't fit into 80 chars, which is why one
submission removed "Dylan" and the other removed "New Yorker"_

~~~
th0ma5
Well, you have more karma by far, so hopefully you're not too upset :D This
link mentions the affiliation so perhaps it just gets more attention because
of that. I have been in this spot often, but in general meta-HN stuff is a bit
OT, so sorry heh.

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monochromatic
> "The lies are over now," he said. "I understand the gravity of my position.
> I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and
> readers."

This reads as "I am _so_ so sorry that I got caught."

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dlevine
Sounds like the story of Stephen Glass, whose meteoric rise at The New
Republic was halted when it surfaced that many of his articles were made up
(in part or in whole). There was a movie about it starring Hayden Christensen.
Pretty interesting stuff.

It's fascinating how a promising young journalist gets busted every few years
for making things up. I wonder how prevalent this is.

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ChuckMcM
Sad. Too many people operate with the motto 'its not illegal if you don't get
caught'. It nearly always turns out badly for them.

~~~
MrEnigma
Well, we know the ones it turns out badly for. Who knows how many out there
got away with it.

~~~
ChuckMcM
True enough. And sometimes people think they got away with it and then it
catches up to them unexpectedly. Like schraeds comment (which you can see if
you show dead) its even worse when they might otherwise be contributing useful
stuff.

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julianz
I love the irony of being fired for making up shit about Dylan, a noted
"borrower" of other people's ideas himself!

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sensui
Now some people are bothered because a guy who sells a bunch of books, made up
quotes. Well, in academy this is the rule, most citations are just skimmed and
put in papers just because they sound arcane/profound. If people are buying,
shame on editors, who not revised well. Even worse, why on earth the source is
more important than content? Status seeking is what people do when trying to
signal intelligence. Maintaining a track of published book/posts like most
writers/popscience/ do is not easy. If you are already on the staff, is more
efficient to manage to become permanent, then trying to be "moral". And all
this time, only now someone accused him. I doubt very seriusly he'll become
unemployed for this.

~~~
gruseom
It is _not_ the rule in academia that people just make up quotes. Not any
place I was ever at, anyway.

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dag11
At least he was caught before he became another Stephen Glass.

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gadders
Sounds like another Johan Hari:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Journalistic_contro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Journalistic_controversy)

although to his credit Lehrer probably wasn't editing his rivals' wikipedia
pages and writing gay incest porn.

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batista
Slightly off topic: what's with the barrage of "Mr" and "Mr"? Is this proper
american english? He even writes "Mr. Dylan" like he is some unknown guy.

