Good morning.
Whitewater’s Sunday will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-four.
On this day in 1945, WWII ended as Japan formally surrendered aboard the USS Missouri.
On this day in 1969, the first ATM opened for business:
Longtime readers know that in March of this year, I decided to stop posting stories from Wired, after two to which I had linked turned out to be bogus. They were not the only bogus stories at Wired, one now learns: Prof. Charles Seife has published a review of plagiarist of Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com. Wired has since fired him. (Lehrer earlier resigned from the New Yorker, and lost a book contract over other lies.)
Here’s Seife on Lehrer’s misconduct:
In short, I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood. This shows not only in his attitude toward quotations but in some of the other details of his writing. And a journalist who repeatedly fails to correct errors when they’re pointed out is, in my opinion, exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth.
It is thus my opinion that Lehrer plagiarized others’ work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out.
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.
This lack of scrutiny isn’t just a journalist’s problem. It’s been true of more than one local politician, across America, too: junk theories, dodgy data, unscrutinized in a servile local press, risibly allowed to pass for good reasoning and sound policy. Readers didn’t get what they deserved from Lehrer’s publications; many residents across America haven’t received what they deserve from their governments, either.
From Google’s daily puzzle, a bit of numbers and letters: “What is the numerical value (to five decimal places) of the constant represented by the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet?”
Like leaders, once we all become authors, none of us are authors.