June 28, 2012
Jonah Lehrer Just Does Not Know How To Do Journalism
To be read alongside this previous post and the additional links below it, more opinions on Jonah Lehrer from Gawker:
Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who's The New Yorker's newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he's written for The New Yorker so far. A self-plagiarist, he is. Big time. What's the latest? He is an even bigger time plagiarist (self, and otherwise!) than we knew yesterday. And for it, he should probably be eased out of journalism's highest echelon.
The news yesterday set off a predictable wave of digging into Lehrer's past work, revealing that his penchant for reusing old material without disclosure was not limited to a few blog posts. Edward Champion found "twelve pages of lifted passages" in just the first 100 pages of Lehrer's recent book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer's January New Yorker article on brainstorming now has an editor's note disclosing that Lehrer took Noam Chomsky quotes from a story (not written by him) in Technology Review and inserted them into his story, making it appear as if he had spoken to Chomsky himself.
More here.
Posted by Henry Molofsky at 06:44 AM | Permalink
Comments
Yikes, it's Johann Hari redux, isn't it?!!
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jun 28, 2012 7:21:05 AM
Really depressing.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 28, 2012 12:01:53 PM
If you've heard speeches by any public figure (author or politician or scientist or journalist or whatever) you'll find entire passages are routinely recycled. But this is considered bad for books or newspaper articles. Maybe one problem here is with a medium (blogs) which blends registers - words that have the informality of speech, but the permanence of text.
Posted by: prasad | Jun 28, 2012 1:05:07 PM
It's ok. He can work for Newsday.
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Jun 28, 2012 1:23:14 PM
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