By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Nina Subin Jonah Lehrer.Jonah Lehrer, the journalist whose self-borrowings and fabricated quotes led last summer to his firing from The New Yorker and the withdrawal of his best-selling book “Imagine,” appeared at a community journalism conference in Miami on Tuesday to offer his first extensive public statement about his misdeeds.
The talk, according to a spokesman for the Knight Foundation, which sponsored the conference, was aimed at sparking a “thought-provoking discussion” making its audience “more savvy about developing the promise and minimizing the perils of journalism projects.”
The event wasn’t quite Lance Armstrong on “Oprah,” but the news of Mr. Lehrer’s speech, which was streamed live online, certainly provoked plenty of advance incredulity. David Dobbs, a writer for Wired (which also severed ties with Mr. Lehrer in August), posted “Three Questions for Jonah Lehrer,” including: “Will you confess to anything that others haven’t already exposed or stand on the verge of exposing?” Others wondered why the Knight Foundation made no mention of Mr. Lehrer’s recent troubles or even noted the existence of “Imagine.”
Mr. Lehrer, who was paid a $20,000 honorarium, dived right in with a full-throated mea culpa. “I am the author of a book on creativity that contains several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes,” he told the crowd, which apparently could not be counted on to have followed the intense schadenfreude-laced commentary that accompanied his downfall. “I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I plagiarized from myself. I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.”
“My mistakes have caused deep pain to those I care about,” he continued. “I’m constantly remembering all the people I’ve hurt and let down.”
If the introduction had the ring of an Alcoholics Anonymous declaration, before too long Mr. Lehrer was surrendering to the higher power of scientific research, cutting back and forth between his own story and the kind of scientific terms — “confirmation bias,” “anchoring” — he helped popularize. Within minutes he had pivoted from his own “arrogance” and other character flaws to the article on flawed forensic science within the F.B.I. that he was working on when his career began unraveling, at one point likening his own corner-cutting to the overconfidence of F.B.I. scientists who fingered the wrong suspect in the 2004 Madrid bombings.
“If we try to hide our mistakes, as I did, any error can become a catastrophe,” he said, adding: “The only way to prevent big failures is a willingness to consider every little one.”
To fend off future errors, Mr. Lehrer vowed to implement what he termed “standard operating procedures” that many journalists, he acknowledged, already follow. “If I’m lucky enough to write again,” he said, “everything I write will be fact-checked and fully footnoted,” he said. All his interviews, he added, will be taped and transcribed, with transcripts available to any interview subject who asks.
Throughout, Mr. Lehrer tended to describe his troubles in terms of “errors” and “mistakes” instead of deceptions and lies, as some of the Twitter posts scrolling down the giant video screen behind him pointed out. “Lehrer was humbled to realize how arrogant he was,” tweeted Slate’s Daniel Engber. “Even now, he’s humbled by his arrogance, and arrogant about his humility.” Others, including Mr. Moynihan, the journalist who discovered the fabricated Dylan quotations, noted on Twitter that Mr. Lehrer had still not addressed charges that another of his books, “How We Decide,” also contains problematic passages.
But Mr. Lehrer, who closed his talk by quoting something Bob Dylan “actually said,” insisted that he was not eager to let himself off the hook. Hanging in his office, he said, is a big poster of Mr. Dylan by the graphic designer Milton Glaser, who has also challenged some quotations attributed to him in “Imagine.”
“It makes me flinch every time I look at it,” he said. “And that’s the point. “
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