Once again, Jonah Lehrer is in the news. Charles Seife was tasked by Wired.com to give Lehrer’s blog posts the once-over. You can read Seife’s findings here, but let me summarize: Lehrer passed fiction off as fact, other’s work as his own, and his old work as new work. Seife begins the end of his Lehrer piece as so…
Lehrer’s transgressions are inexcusable—but… [excerpt from here]
Uh-oh. The dreaded “but”…
Lehrer’s transgressions are inexcusable—but 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; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him. [excerpt from here]
Hmmmmmm… I just knew when I saw “—but” I wouldn’t like what followed…
Lehrer is a grown man that damn well knew “plagiarism, dodgy quotes, and factual inaccuracies” were fucked up. He did it all anyway. He is an adult that made choices that had consequences – some good (e.g. New Yorker gig) and some bad (e.g. losing New Yorker gig). If we own the good, we have to own the bad. That’s the deal. It’s called being a grown-up.
Part of being a grown-up is being our own “safety net”. I don’t have “layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors” to check my scribbles. Sure, my scribbles are mainly reserved for this ranty fake journal, but… it’s down to me to get my facts straight. I don’t need an editor to to tell me lying and cheating is fucked up. I know it’s fucked up. I’m confident that if I had an editor, they’d want me to know it’s fucked up so they didn’t have to babysit me all the damn time. So they didn’t have to spend their time, quite frankly, doing my job – i.e., making sure I don’t fuck-up.
Lehrer fucked up, got caught, and seems to be owning it - how about we let him? He is a grown-up, after all.
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@DrRubidium Editor-in-Commandant
