WiReD surgically removes damaged neurotrash 'expert'
Jonah and the wail
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Glossy lifestyle magazine WiReD will sever its relationship with pop neuroscience journalist and author Jonah Lehrer, the author of Imagine: How Creativity Works.
In late July, Lehrer was cut loose by New Yorker after he manufactured Bob Dylan quotes and then fibbed about their provenance to grownups at the posh mag. Lehrer had already come under fire for recycling his WiReD Frontal Cortext blog posts for the New Yorker's website, prompting dozens of "you may have read this crap before" flags.
But WiReD, curiously, kept him on.
The mag's publisher Conde Nast then commissioned a study into Lehrer's online output, and gave a journalism professor a random sample of 18 of the scribe's blog posts. Some plagiarism was allegedly discovered, although to be fair most of the sample involved the sort of churnalism practised by most of Fleet Street: recycling press releases.
(A study of BBC science journalism last year by the BBC Trust found that 75 per cent of science stories were based on a single press release, and 7 out of every 8 of those contain no other source other than the issuer of the press release.)
WiReD wouldn't publish the Lehrer probe's findings, but Slate magazine, with its best more-in-sorrow-than-anger voice on, did. You can read it here. Having caught wind of Slate's story, WiReD finally pulled the trigger.
It must be a coincidence that WiReD editor-in-chief Chris Anderson was discovered lifting huge chunks of material for his book Free from Whackipedia. We discussed the ironies of that story and Lehrer's Dylan blunder here. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Phoney phoneyism
"People who make up Dylan quotes should be shot"
- Bob Dylan
Re: Color me unsurprised...
When I'm Prime Minister there are going to be some changes made! But those take time, and annoy people. So to start things off, I'm going to ban idiots from setting black type on brown or dark blue backgrounds, so that it's illegible, and makes my eyes bleed. This is even more annoying and unforgivable in crappy magazines like wIrEd than it is on websites (where I can usually do something about it).
I haven't decided on a punishment yet. There's bringing back the stocks, of course, but I'm thinking of something like having them poked, repeatedly, in the eyes with cocktail sticks.
Science "Journalism" works something like this
Scientist: So in conclusion, I can say we have successfully developed a cold resistant strain of wheat that could increase yields in colder climes.
"Journalist": So , for instance, you could grow wheat in the Arctic?
-Scribbles down headline "Scientists develop wheat that grows in the Arctic-
Scientist: Well, theoretically it could survive arctic temperatures for a short while, but
"Journalist": Ok, all done here, thanks.
-Back at the "Science Journalism Cave"-
"Science Editor": We'll need some extra input on this one, maybe you could contact some environmentalists, this "Wheat in the Arctic" sounds like the sort of thing that would rile them up and we can get some great quotes.
-Some phone calls later-
Nutty Enviromentalist: How dare these so called scientists despoil the practically untouched arctic wilderness. Just another example of how Humans are exploiting the whole plant. And the Arctic ice is already under threat from global warming, and now they want to thaw more of it to irrigate their Arctic wheat farms!
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