Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/jonah-lehrer-resigns-from-new-yorker-after-making-up-dylan-quotes-for-his-book/?hp

by kevinalexbrown • 14 years ago

99 72 14 years ago

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

gojomo• 14 years ago

Nonsurvivorship bias.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

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.

astrodust• 14 years ago

Jonah Lehrer famously said "I'll never get caught, you can't catch me." and "If I get caught I'll eat my shoe." At least, that's what I've just made up and attributed to him.

awj2• 14 years ago

"You are skirting dangerously close to creating a meme here." -- Jonah Lehrer

credo• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

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.

alecco4• 14 years ago

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

tptacek2• 14 years ago

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

dclowd9901• 14 years ago

To what are you referring? And how did this fly completely out of my radar?

raphman• 14 years ago

random source from the Wikipedia article: http://exiledonline.com/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-int...

SilasX• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have affected his popularity, his income, or people's tendency to suspend rational thought and go ga-ga over his latest profundity.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

I've never heard of this until now. Reading the article people have mentioned below:

http://exiledonline.com/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-int...

Well, it's a really badly written article, full of "association" but I can't really find anything damning, just a bunch of innuendo, which could be invented about most any sufficiently prolific journalist.

I've read a lot of Gladwell's writing -- the only main theme I can find is that he just tends to write articles that fly in the face of received wisdom. That's his whole shtick. He plays devil's advocate.

So obviously, if he defends unpopular positions, you can read into that all you want, but I don't see any real evidence that it's ideological or driven by corporate support. It's just his writing style, and you can probably find just as many counter-examples.

jorahmormont• 14 years ago

I disagree. Gladwell's long standing self-disclosure is a serious analysis on his own motivations and corporate relationships. http://www.gladwell.com/disclosure.html . Claiming that he is a corporate shill seems unfair. Despite his "igonvalues" issues, I haven't seen any serious corporate bias in his works. Are you sure your own remarks aren't due to some bias that you may have?

hammock• 14 years ago

The full AP story has more info at the bottom. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEB7lzn2h8...

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?

jkt• 14 years ago

This is the article to which AP refers:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

ajross• 14 years ago

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.

danso5• 14 years ago

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.

aaronsw• 14 years ago

The details are here:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/107779/jon...

danvideo• 14 years ago

Tablet's been on and offline all day, I'd imagine from server overload--- Michael Moynihan, the author, was the one who originally broke the story with his investigations.

misiti3780• 14 years ago

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_• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

acdanger• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the episode where John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame was sued by a former label for recording a song that was too similar to one he had recorded prior with another record label.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogerty_v._Fantasy

msg• 14 years ago

I don't know the facts here.

In author land, you may have sold the publication rights to the prior work to someone, and you may not have reprint/derivative works rights without a new deal.

You can see rights clearances on the copyright pages of some of your favorite novels, anthologies, and story collections: "Portions of this work appeared in a substantially different form in ANALOG June 2005."

When I see this in magazines and newspapers the credit to prior work is often in italics at the end. I guess I assumed cash (or backscratching) was on the line for them.

msredmond3• 14 years ago

I'm a journalist -- technically you can't plagiarize yourself, so while not best form, it's not really anything "wrong." And often there's certain phrases that as a writer you are going to use over and again (he took it well beyond that though). So that's why he was still around. But yes making up quotes is WAY across the line. I'm curious if he just up and resigned knowing he would be fired; if I were his boss, I'd rather fire him to make sure people know how serious his transgressions are.

danso5• 14 years ago

Self-plagiarism is most definitely not as "wrong" as plagiarizing from someone else. But in some contexts, the amount of work you've produced for esteemed publications is essentially part of your prestige and resume. To have significant number of pieces actually just be recycled material, while bragging about how you were published in X, Y, Z magazine, is looked down upon.

dmazin2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

aheilbut• 14 years ago

His link to Aaron Sorkin's recycled dialogue is hilarious. (Fortunately Sorkin writes fiction.)

MartinCron4• 14 years ago

It is easy to call the Radio lab guys "messy" but it is a lot harder to tell compelling science stories that fit the medium and the audience. If you can name a better general-audience radio show about science, I will eat my tote bag.

dmazin2• 14 years ago

Radiolab is incredibly compelling, I agree. I listen to every episode. I can't think of a more entertaining science radio show, but we need to define "better" if you want me to name a better one. There are certainly more scientifically accurate and informative shows, like Science Friday and Car Talk, and The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

Radiolab is so entertaining because it's willing to compromise accuracy - and sometimes any tie to reality as with the whale-thanking-the-diver episode - for the sake of a good story. And because of this, it's hard to call it a science show, just like it's hard to call Armageddon a science movie.

dag11• 14 years ago

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

monochromatic• 14 years ago

> "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."

julianz• 14 years ago

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

sensui• 14 years ago

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.

gruseom3• 14 years ago

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

rprasad• 14 years ago

In academia, quotes and excerpts are cited. They can be verified. Many publications do verify (at least a random selection of) the citations in an article they are publishing.

dlevine• 14 years ago

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.

gadders• 14 years ago

Sounds like another Johan Hari:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Journalistic_contro...

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

batista• 14 years ago

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.

Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

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