Jonah Lehrer
Two years ago, I posted a piece here calling Jonah Lehrer the next Malcolm Gladwell. I understand that people have differing views of Gladwell, but I intended that as high praise. Like Gladwell, Lehrer had distinguished himself as a writer who could extract sometimes abstruse findings from neuroscience and show, with grace and wit, how they changed the way we think about ourselves.
Sadly, we now know that Lehrer has been keeping secrets. He hid at least two kinds of offenses: He has been recycling his old work, cutting and pasting into what are supposed to be new articles, without telling his editors or readers. And he has recycled the work of other writers, likewise cutting and pasting it into his own work.
The revelations come a mere two weeks after Lehrer announced that he was moving his blog, Frontal Cortex, to The New Yorker from Wired, where he had established himself a few years ago and burnished his reputation. "I’ve got some news to share," he wrote on June 5th. "I’ve decided to accept a staff writer position at the New Yorker. Needless to say, I’m very excited." He included the link to Frontal Cortex at The New Yorker, where, he wrote, readers could find "all my new posts." As it happens, they are not so new.
Lehrer has five posts up at The New Yorker, and every one of them now begins with an editor's note saying that portions of this post "appeared in similar form" at either Wired.com, or in Wired magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, The Boston Globe, or his own books, Imagine: How Creativity Works and How We Decide.
The trouble began on Tuesday morning. The media watcher Jim Romenesko noted that sections of a June 12 post by Lehrer entitled "Why Smart People Are Stupid" were essentially the same as parts of a Wall Street Journal piece Lehrer published last October. Lehrer didn't do much to hide this: The copied sections were the opening grafs of both pieces. Romenesko reproduced the copied sections without comment, except to say he had called NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson (a former senior editor at Wired) for comment. He updated the post with Thomspon's reply: “It’s a mistake. We’re not happy. It won’t happen again.”
Once Romenesko had sprinkled blood in the water, others quickly reported additional Lehrer misdeeds. Joe Coscarelli noted in The Daily Intel at New York magazine that in his book Imagine, Lehrer had copied a paragraph from a Malcolm Gladwell story in The New Yorker. Lehrer also used quotes from Noam Chomsky without noting that they were said to another reporter--not to Lehrer. And reviews of Lehrer's books in Columbia Magazine and The New Republic noted that he had borrowed heavily from others.
Jennifer Schuessler wrote on Arts Beat at The New York Times that Lehrer is a popular speaker but has "drawn less enthusiastic reviews" for his books. She quoted one reviewer who wrote that his book Imagine "displayed some 'elementary' scientific errors." She reached Lehrer by phone, and quotes him as saying, "It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong.”
The irony of all this comes at us like a blast from a firehose. This is the author of "Why Smart People Are Stupid" and a book about how creativity works. One might argue that Lehrer brings more personal experience to those issues than we would like.
It's a safe bet that more revelations will follow. But the present revelations give us more than enough material to examine the journalistic questions raised by Lehrer's offenses. (For a comprehensive catalogue of Lehrer offenses, see Edward Champion's post at Reluctant Habits.)
First--the question of plagiarizing oneself. I can't see any objection to Lehrer recycling his own work--if he's transparent about it. And that was the problem here: He wasn't. It's customary for journalists to cross post entire pieces from one outlet to another, and it's customary for writers to quote from their past work. It's perfectly fine to write several articles on the same or similar subjects for different outlets, provided the editors at those outlets are aware of the situation and don't object.
What is not fine is to do this without telling anyone. If anyone tells you the Lehrer situation is complicated, don't believe it. The journalism issues are simple, and clear: Don't deceive editors. And, far more importantly, don't deceive readers. Notice how Scientific American Mind handled this three years ago, when a Lehrer post was expanded into a magazine story:
Editors' note, 7/8/09: This article was adapted for Scientific American Mind magazine from the Mind Matters article, "Do Parents Matter?", which was published online at ScientificAmerican.com on April 9, 2009.
No problem there. That's full disclosure.
Second--the question of using the work of others without attribution. Again, the analysis is simple: It's theft, and it's wrong. Lehrer is making money off of other people's work. It shows terrible disrespect for readers. And it undermines the credibility of other writers.
Some of the criticism of Lehrer rests on fuzzy notions of what it means to be a writer, versus what it means to be "an idea man." Josh Levin at Slate says that Lehrer has ceased to be a writer and has instead become an idea man. Because ideas are hard to come by, he's mostly forced to recycle the ones he's had. This muddies a simple picture. He blogs, he writes articles, and he writes books. I don't find it useful or accurate to say he is no longer a writer. (Although the current revelations and any more to come could put an end to his writing career.) Nor do I find it helpful to apply some different standard to "an idea man." Copying words that have already been written is wrong unless that copying is clearly disclosed.
Giving a stump speech, as politicians do, is less objectionable, although at times when I have hired speakers for the annual science writers' meeting, I have been distressed to recognize that they're giving the stump speech, not an original talk. I've been less offended when speakers have told me outright that they would give me the scientist-at-work speech, say, rather than the ethics-of-research talk. I appreciated the disclosure. It allowed me to extend an invitation knowing what I would be getting.
As I said, I expect we'll be hearing more about Lehrer. Whether his career is over is not for me to judge. If editors continue to want to pay him to write, and if readers want to hear what he has to say, his career will continue. If editors or readers abandon him, he might do better to give it up and hang out a different shingle: "J. Lehrer, Idea Man."
- Paul Raeburn
Comments
Link above (cut and paste if it doesn't click through)
Harlan Ellison: Pay The Writer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE
I'm wholeheartedly with Richard Conniff on this issue.
Journalism is insisting on professional behavior in an inherently unprofessional environment journalism itself created: the unpaid writer, the unpaid blogger, the unpaid columnist, the unpaid HuffPo contributor, and so forth.
While Mr. Lehrer may be one of the few lucky blokes receiving a paycheck for his blog contributions, he’s working in a long-established culture of people who receive no paycheck for same, and is putting to use the “you get what you pay for” tools of that trade. He got caught because he's high profile.
This culture of the unpaid writer has wreaked havoc all over our industry, turning what used to be a handful of wage-gratis wannabes into legions of wage-less slaves.
All working for what? Recognition? "Hits?" Some distant book contract? Or someone else's advertising model?
The problem of the unpaid writer starts in J-School. One of the world's finest J-Schools -- the University of Missouri -- for instance, pays none of its weekly columnists on its newspaper of record, the Missourian.
If this Jonah Lehrer controversy starts any conversation, it ought to be about the need for journalism to stop cannibalizing itself -- and us, its practitioners, to flat out stop tolerating it.
If publishers (who get paychecks, btw, sometimes very large ones like Arianna Huffington's) want professional behavior, then publishers need treat their writers, bloggers, columnists, and so forth like professionals.
First stop on that road: PAY THE WRITER!
Author Harlan Ellison makes that case profoundly here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g- fE
With regard to ordinary readers, the misrepresentation in recycling yourself is potentially disappointing to a few, I suppose, but it's not the kind of thing that would entitle you to your money back on a purchase. I'd expect more upset from the customers who learned that their delicious Alice Waters meal was made with frozen peas.
In sourcing famous quotes, it's got to depend on how famous the quote is, how responsible the source is for its fame and whether you verified its authenticity independently yourself. The potential wrongs I see in failing to source are, let's see, 1) making readers think you did due diligence when you didn't, 2) misinforming them as to who stands behind the quote, 3) depicting yourself as being more widely read or resourceful in some regard than you actually are and 4) failing to give a source his or her due credit. For a source that is the umpteenth of many more stories on a subject that you're fairly well versed in, by an writer who who took more care than you would have to get the quote right, not to mention you double checked his or her work--none of these wrongs seem significant. It's no high crime a priori, in other words.
As Brandon says, we don't know what motivated Lehrer to do what he did, except that he has now acknowledged himself that it was wrong. Whatever his motives, I'm not inclined to be sympathetic. Writers who recycle or otherwise make it easier on themselves make it harder for others who are following the rules to compete. If the science can't support the kind of stories Lehrer wants to write, there's an easy fix for that: Cover something else.
Richard has a fair point about blogs not compensating writers, but at least they are transparent about that. And Lehrer doesn't have to write for blogs that don't pay; quitting will not affect his income. And we can assume, I think, that his offline work does pay--and he's had problems there, too.
Deborah Blum objects to self-plagiarism on these grounds: "But does it honor the agreement or support of the publication that actually paid for the work." The assumption that these blogs actually pay for the work, or pay a living wage, is mistaken. They may be prestigious blogs, but if the editors there want free content, as they often do, it is just hypocritical for them to complain when they get recycled content. In fact, I don't hear much complaining from the editors themselves, who must realize that they created this embarrassing circumstance. And that leads me to think there is another underlying motive for the journalistic community to come down on Lehrer so severely: The guy just got a staff position at The New Yorker. Jealousy, anyone? I have to say that back in 2008 Lehrer borrowed a paragraph from one of my articles and credited it--but to somebody else. I called him on it, and it took a while to get his attention, but then he made the fix and apologized pretty abjectly.
What Josh Levin wrote about the tension between being an idea man and a writer resonated with me, though the phrasing might have been improved by replacing "writer" with "journalist." By this I mean no disparagement of Jonah's work, but there is absolutely a tension -- even a downright opposition -- between the demands of life in the 21st century public intellectual complex and the duties of a journalist. I think this is especially true for public intellectuals who traffic in the cognitive and behavioral sciences, in which there's enormous public appetite (and professional reward) for the sort of glossy, neatly-wrapped, here's-why-people-do-X insights that Malcolm Gladwell made so famous. The science can't support very many of those narratives.
If Jonah indeed self-recycled material in an unfortunately non-transparent manner because he didn't have the appetite to weave a couple interesting observations into a seamless container for the human experience, one should be sympathetic. And while that's speculative, and maybe doesn't apply to his experience, it's still relevant at a time when journalists are pressured to become what Robert so aptly called "multi-platform personal media brands."
Lee,
We do live in changing times, and some rules are being rewritten. Journalists have long recycled their reporting in their books, and I don't think that's a problem. Journalists have also recycled ideas, and sometimes adopted others' ideas as their own, which might, or might not, look like plagiarism, depending upon the circumstances. In his defense of Lehrer, Gladwell broadens the definition of plagiarism to the point where it applies any time a writer quotes someone else. That's not helpful.
Lehrer doesn't buy that either. He says what he did was "absolutely wrong."
For another interesting view of these issues, take a look at Curtis Brainard's piece last year charging Carl Safina with misappropriating others' work in his book on the Gulf oil spill. This is tricky stuff.
You've raised one of the points here that really bothers me, Lee. It's not just that he's "self-plagiarizing" - whatever that really means - it's that he's recycling work that he did for others and that other publications paid for without crediting those publications. Is it legal - sure, if the author holds the copyright. But does it honor the agreement or support of the publication that actually paid for the work. I think not which gets us into some ethically murky territory. In the end, though, I think Paul's right about the simplest point - that journalist honesty is the easy answer and the best one.
Nicely said, Paul. I have been following Jonah's troubles with great interest. His misconduct is giving me a lot to think about concerning transparency, intellectual property, and the evolving standards of how we write and report in this era of multi-platform personal media branding.
From whom am I stealing when I Tweet about what I blogged about what I Facebooked about when I Youtubed about what I wrote you in that email about the article I have coming out today?
One of my colleagues today shared with me Malcom Gladwell's response to the charge that Jonah had stolen one of his lines:
"In 2006, I quoted a line from William Goldman about how no one knows anything in Hollywood. In Imagine, Jonah Lehrer quotes the same line. This is not surprising, since Goldman’s comment is one of the most famous things ever written about Hollywood and has been quoted, by journalists, probably hundreds of times since it was written. If Lehrer is plagiarizing me, by quoting the same quote I quoted, then I am plagiarizing the person who used that quote before me, and that person is plagiarizing the person who quoted it before them, and so on and so forth, and we have a daisy chain of “plagiarizing” going back forty years and plagiarism, as a ethical concept, has ceased to mean anything at all.
By the way, if I run across the same absurd allegation anywhere else, I intend to reproduce my comment verbatim. Why? Because I thought about what I wanted to say, I’m comfortable with the way I said it, and I see no reason to tinker with my own language for the sake of tinkering with my own language."
I basically agree with Gladwell's point about adages, and think it goes more broadly to how writers are supposed to improve their own work by absorbing the expressive rhythms and phrases from the exemplars of our craft and incorporating them into our own writing. That's how personal style and language as a whole evolves and cliches are born anew.
What Jonah did wrong though is something different, it seems to me. He resold work that he already had sold to somebody else -- Wired, The Wall Street Journal, etc. --- who retain possession of that intellectual property. To me that is more like renting the same apartment to two or three different tenants at the same time.
As for his borrowing from himself for his book, he had the responsibility to seek copyright permission and that's is nothing new or novel about that obligation. He clearly failed in that case to follow the long-established practice of acknowledging that some of the material had previously appeared in various forms in various publications.
For me, this is less complicated. The Wall Street Journal supports my reporting and owns my published prose. For freelancers who may report on spec and may quite properly shop the same idea in slightly different form to different customers, it no doubt can quickly become more byzantine. A publisher may reasonably expect to own first rights to the sequence of words of the final published article, but who owns the story concept and the raw material of interviews? Who owns the other ideas that arise during an assigment?
What say you all?
Lee
Hurrah, Paul. Well put. Whatever one calls what Lehrer did - and I'm among those who think self-plagiarism is a self-destructing oxymoron - what he did do is probably a breach of contract. His deal with New Yorker may have said something about an expectation of original material.
What is impossible to understand, as a simple matter of craft while setting deeper ethical issues aside, is that any professional writer who wishes to make point he or she has made in print before, would not rewrite, paraphrase, mix-and-stir and otherwise disguise things that have no additional information to what said writer has previously published. And even then - it would be sensible to tell editors the source, just as New Yorker's fact checkers should have demanded and spotted. They probably would have had Romenesko not blown the whistle first. He was, if the reports of his actions are true, doomed by his own hand.
Paul's analysis is fair and, as far I can determine, accurate.
I'm pretty sure that all writers recycle their own ideas, concepts, even favorite phrases. Many good writers also steal--borrow?--other writers' ideas and phrases. Must be dozens of us who have explained a black hole the same way--having gravity "so strong that not even light can escape."
There are gray areas in that stuff. But not in deceiving editors by turning in supposedly original work that was previously published. Here, apparently, the offense is not in borrowing a handy phrase but in reselling as new whole paragraphs or more.
But the worst offense is in stealing similarly-sized chunks of somebody else's writing. I know writers who have been fired summarily for such offenses.
Is this no longer such an obviously mortal sin? Has the ease of our copy-and-paste craft and our multiplying digital platforms--and the blurring of what it means to be a journalist... Have these things blunted our ethical acuity? Are Lehrer's employers actually debating what to do?
Thanks for writing this in such a thoughtful and comprehensive way, Paul. I think many of us are sorry to see a high-end science writer stumble this way but you do a great job of putting it in perspective - right from the start. By the way, here's an additional post from Poynter (where they've been quite cranky about Lehrer from the start): http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/178061/jonah-lehrer-is-sorr...