Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com | Hacker News Reader

Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com

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45 pointstptacek27 comments

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.

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.

Mind sharing the articles that you found?

This paragraph:

"There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book."

From this article:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_ill...

The first half I believe comes from John Taylor Gatto's analysis of the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

Which he shouldn't have been using in 2008, because the 2003 data had already been released well before at that point. The primary source is here:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=93275

The next two statistics seem to originate from this article:

http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cf...

However, if you read it you'll notice that A) Almost none of the claims are sourced and B) many of them contradict each other C) They completely contradict the data from the government's survey on citizen's participation in literature and the arts: http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf.

Thus, leading me to believe that most of the 'statistics' are in fact entirely apocryphal to begin with.

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.

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

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...). 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm interested in the amount of text a journalist has to produce these days, any metrics?

E.G. suppose a feature story that is something like 3000 words. How much time to research, synthesise &c?

* 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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

You are right. I should have said public radio shows This American Life and Radio Labs (where Lehrer was a frequent contributor). I originally thought he was on This American Life too, but can't verify that.

I think it's a much bigger problem for The New Yorker, which actually had Lehrer on staff, than it is for the radio show that had him on once or twice. Lehrer was not like David Sedaris or David Rackoff.

Well, it's probably worse for Lehrer than for anybody else. I continue to enjoy The New Yorker and I don't think any less of them. I feel bad for him, though. He's relatively young and a good writer. I enjoyed his three books, especially Imagine. Perhaps he could reinvent himself as a fiction author, but somehow I doubt it will happen.

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