Fired from Wired
Posted on September 4th, 2012 in Uncategorized | No Comments »
After being forced to resign from the New Yorker, fabricator Jonah Lehrer has now been fired by Wired, which just finished a review of his work.
According to HuffPo,
More than a dozen Lehrer posts — chosen both by Wired editors and Seife — reportedly contained examples of recycling, press-release plagiarism, outright plagiarism, “issues with quotations” and other factual problems.
The author of Wired’s report tries to contextualize Lehrer’s actions by talking about the lack of senior people to mentor him, ethically-speaking:
….I can’t help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I’m 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer…Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.
This is kind, but far too generous. None of those people are necessary to know that you don’t make stuff up. (And as Stephen Glass has shown, none of them will inevitably catch a fabricator.) That’s a “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” kinda rule: Don’t lie.
As far as saving Lehrer, what would there be to save? His work is riddled with corruption that isn’t about not knowing journalistic standards, it’s about making deliberate choices to be dishonest. There’s not a copy editor in the world who could do anything about that.
Incidentally, Charles Seife, the author of the report, published it on Slate after Wired decided not to publish the whole thing. Not sure exactly how ethical that is. If Wired gave him permission to do so, I expect it wouldn’t be a problem. But in his Slate article, Seife is less than direct about the issue.