Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com

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.

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.

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.

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.