71–77 of 77 posts
It's fascinating how a promising young journalist gets busted every few years for making things up. I wonder how prevalent this is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time Gladwell (another New Yorker writer) was exposed for being a corporate shill, something quite more serious. Nothing happened.
random source from the Wikipedia article: http://exiledonline.com/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-int...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"making stuff up" is worse than "constructing a biased argument"
Making up Dylan quotes seems a lot more benign than discouraging people from suing tobacco companies and saying Ritalin is safe.
"I like to grab old women's tits from behind, they never know what's coming" laughed the mayoral candidate in a private moment last night. By the way, Coke is better than Pepsi.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, being a "corporate shill" is not "quite more serious" than fabricating quotes.
"No, being a 'corporate shill' is not 'quite more serious' than fabricating quotes." How do you figure? Do you actually think that corporate shills cause less harm to society than people fabricating a few (largely inconsequential) quotes?
Accentuate the positives, believe the same truths your customers believe.
If you're a journalist, whose job it is to report the truth and nothing more, lying of any sort is arguably the gravest offense you can commit (short of rape, murder, etc.)
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
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.
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.