

Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com   - tptacek
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/jonah_lehrer_plagiarism_in_wired_com_an_investigation_into_plagiarism_quotes_and_factual_inaccuracies_.html

======
tokenadult
This one nails Lehrer to the wall:

"In a third post from mid-2011 titled "Basketball and Jazz," one of Lehrer's
paragraphs closely paralleled one written by Newsweek science writer Sharon
Begley some three years earlier.

"Lehrer:

"The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches
and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched
video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos
here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at
predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more
than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and
writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time.

"Newsweek:

"In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters
(considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of
someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether
the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw,
compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and
writers.

"Tellingly, Begley misstated the number of participants in the study. (There
were only 5 coaches and 5 sportswriters, not 10 of each. In addition, there
were also 10 people in the novice group who were neither coaches nor
sportswriters.) Lehrer made the exact same mistake in precisely the same
manner."

When Lehrer reproduces someone else's mistake, you know he isn't looking up or
verifying the facts himself. The honorable thing to do in a blog would be
simply to link to Begley's piece and say, "Sharon Begley wrote an interesting
article a few years ago about a study on this issue."

P.S. I posted an article to HN earlier about the initial discovery of Lehrer
making up quotations in articles in other publications.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370417>

I had also seen him "recycle" earlier writings of his in paid publications,
because once one of his articles was submitted here to HN, and I thought,
"Hey, I've read this before." Indeed I had, in the previous publication where
he had first written on the same subject a couple years earlier.

~~~
Alex3917
I've mentioned this here before, but similarly I caught Chris Hedges
plagiarizing in one of his articles, in a very similar situation where he had
blatantly copied someone else's mistakes. But when I emailed his editors to
tell them about it, they basically told me to go fuck myself. I'm pretty sure
that most journalistic organizations these days know what's going on and just
don't want any of it to come to light unless some other organization forces
the issue, in which case they then do everything they can to throw the person
under the bus.

~~~
smhinsey
I think part of this is also that no one really wants to admit that a lot of
content that goes out under a given columnist's name is not actually written
by them. The byline is more about branding than authorship these days.

~~~
Alex3917
That's definitely true for newspaper editorials and for columnists, but not
usually for regular articles and blog posts.

------
dredmorbius
So ... this is the result of close analysis of a single author.

As medical types will tell you, one of the problems of running imaging and
diagnostics on ill / injured / diseased patients is that you'll find anomolies
-- not because they're relevant to the illness in question, but because
individuals differ.

What is the prevalence of the cited behaviors -- recycling, press-release
plagiarism, plagiarism, quotation issues, and factual issues -- in an unbiased
sample of other authors / reporters / columnists / essayists?

What, specifically, is wrong with some of the behaviors in question? I haven't
followed the Lehrer situation particularly closely, I'm aware that he's
admitted to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan specifically (not good).

I'm a bit puzzled as to what he's being faulted for in "recycling" --
essentially reusing his own material.

The press-release plagiarism cited appears to involve taking quotes from press
releases, rather than interviews (which Lehrer shaded to sound like it had
been told him directly). The looser view would be that, well, the pres release
"told Lehrer" ... and anyone else reading it. Not great, but a modestly pale
shade of gray.

Direct quotations of the published, non-press-release works of others is
getting rather darker. Though I wouldn't mind knowing what specific
rulebook(s) Seife is playing from when he states: "Journalistic rules about
press releases are murky. Rules about taking credit for other journalists'
prose are not." I mean, I really hope we're not making shit up as we go along
(and frankly have no way of knowing if Seife is or isn't -- he's, erm, not
citing sources, merely his own authority as a professor of journalism).

Seife admits as much later in his piece: "There isn't a canonical code of
conduct for journalists; perfectly reasonable reporters and editors can have
fundamental disagreements about what appear to be basic ethical questions,
such as whether it's kosher to recycle one's own work." He also notes that
recycling can be considered common and acceptable practice, though he feels
"may violate the reader's trust". My own experience, especially in persuasive
writing that's repeated as an author attempts to argue for a position, is that
there is _considerable_ recycling of material, though often an author will
refine and strengthen arguments over time. That's what I myself practice.

Handling quotations also allows for some leeway. It's not uncommon to tidy up
tics of speech and grammar particularly from spoken conversational passages.
It can, in fact, be a _negative_ shading to quote someone with complete
faithfulness and accuracy, including all "ers", "ums", "ahs", and syntactical
tangents and fragments. That said, changing meaning in as fundamental a manner
as to equate memorizing a few stanzas of an epic work with memorizing the
whole thing, _and_ failing to correct it, is pretty bad.

At different points in time, attitudes toward what would currently be
considered plagiarism in news were radically different. It's very, very
helpful to recognize that outside a relatively few fairly stable rules
(murder, real property theft), much of ethics and morals is temporally,
culturally, and situationally relative. Today we suffer witches to live. In
Revolutionary America, plagiarism was common practice
([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-andrlik/how-plagiarism-
ma...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-andrlik/how-plagiarism-made-
ameri_b_1772782.html)). My feeling is that too strict an insistence on
slavishly faithful accuracy can be as much a liability as confabulation. We
know now that war photographers since Brady have staged and arranged subjects
in photographs to more effectively tell stories. That NASA image processing
often involves significant Photoshop enhancement and visible-range
representations of invisible spectra from radio, infra-red, ultra-violet, and
X-ray ranges. That NPR extensively edits interview audio, and will even modify
"live" host comments over the course of repeats of their anchor news programs
Morning Edition and All Things Considered to correct for flubs. That Campbells
put marbles in its soup, that clothing catalog models wear heavily pinned
garments, and that HN moderators will re-edit headlines and censor meta
articles.

Who ya gonna shoot?

If we're going to hang Lehrer, let's hang him for what he's been doing
deliberately and in clear exception to both norms and hard-written rules. Not
based on either fast-and-loose definitions of correctness or normal
deviations.

~~~
tptacek
Taking a published statement from someone and attributing it as if it were an
interview, with the words "this person said to me", is not "tidying up". It's
lying.

~~~
dredmorbius
Claiming that that's what I said ... would also be lying.

~~~
tptacek
No; the word "lie" implies an intent to deceive. If I misunderstood your
comment, that was a "mistake".

------
shock3naw
Is the sunburst background behind Lehrer's head in the table necessary? I
thought this was about being 'professional.'

That being said, I'm glad the journalism community is cracking down on people
who are recycling, plagiarizing, and not fact checking.

------
Alex3917
Meh. There were some of Lehrer's articles that I genuinely liked, but as often
as not I got the feeling that he didn't really know what he was talking about.
Although that's not unlike most other popular Internet science writers.

------
rd108
I'm sorry, none of what I read seemed very egregious to me. In many cases, I
couldn't even decipher whether something had been really plagiarized or not.
You DO use lots of material from other people when writing a story-- some of
these phrases, especially under tight deadlines and late nights, likely jumble
into a mish-mash of words and phrases that might spill out while writing.

Even the case of copying someone else's mistake (in the "10 sportswriters"
example) also seems forgivable to me... and- forgive me if I'm too generous-
just another mistake, albeit this time on Lehrer's part.

~~~
tptacek
* Lehrer takes copy from previous pieces, sometimes whole paragraphs, and uses them in future pieces. The author is ambivalent about how big a transgression this is, but in 18 pieces he looked at, it was easier to count the ones where Lehrer hadn't obviously recycled copy.

* Lehrer copied multiple paragraphs from a press release directly into his piece. More egregiously, he attributed text from one press release as if it had come from an interview.

* Lehrer plagiariased at least 3 journalists, one of them at pretty extreme length, and another so obviously that he copied mistakes the original journalist had made in the underlying facts.

* When Lehrer was working with actual quotations from sources, he changed them, effectively altering what those people had said.

* Lehrer made numerous factual mistakes, like any pop science writer, but when those mistakes were pointed out to him (including by other journalists), rather than issuing a correction, he ignored the mistakes _and then repeated them in future articles_.

I found this pretty damning.

------
rd108
Lehrer himself (@4:50) on the Colbert Report explained why "creatively
borrowing" others work is fundamental to innovative thinking. I would preface
this with "ironically", but he actually believes his argument.

[http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-
videos/41274...](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-
videos/412742/april-17-2012/jonah-lehrer)

------
benologist
Somebody should tell these guys about Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo, Geek and
all the other sites that do this crap for a living.

------
awwstn2
Here's Lehrer's barely-used Twitter account. His most recent Tweet called
Samsung plagiarists: <https://twitter.com/jjonahlehrer>

~~~
kintamanimatt
Wrong twitter account: <https://twitter.com/jonahlehrer>

I used to follow him. Since I last looked he seems to have been on a deleting
spree. Sucks because I really enjoyed his writing.

------
nuxli
Seems like generating this sort of plagiarised output is something we could
train a machine to do. No need to put someone on the payroll to do it.

------
regnum
It's not been a good year for This American Life.

First their story about abuse at Apple factories in China turned out to be
piece of fiction. Now all this with their contributor Jonah Lehrer.

~~~
knowtheory
Hunh? I'm a bit confused why you've singled This American Life out here.

Mike Daisey is an interesting case, and someone who published a lot on the
story he fabricated in a lot of different outlets. This American Life were the
ones were simply the ones who confronted Daisey directly and publicly. Jonah
Lehrer, the extent to which he was a contributor to TAL, was certainly not a
frequent contributor (in fact I don't remember which of their episodes he's
been on at all), but he is much more associated with his magazine work.

Actually i checked This American Life's site. They don't have Jonah Lehrer
listed at all (although they do have a colleague of mine listed twice under
misspellings of her name): <http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/contributor>

~~~
maxerickson
Prior to confronting Daisey, they presented his work as if they had fact
checked it. They say as much in their retraction:

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/460/r...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/460/retraction)

My opinion is that they handled it well, but 'simply the ones who confronted
Daisey directly and publicly' throws away quite a bit of the story.

~~~
knowtheory
That's true, but they were not the only ones who fell prey to that either. My
point about why TAL _stands out_ is that they were the ones to confront him on
it. Not that they were unique in having asserted that his story was true.

