Pump Faking

There are those overachievers like Jonah Lehrer who fear they’ve been promoted beyond their levels of competence. So they cheat to stay there and typically cave under the pressure of performing consistently on the big stage. Jonah Lehrer's most incriminating quote was, “I'm vaguely aware that people wrote books before Google existed, but I have no idea how.” In those words he essentially admitted his ignorance of journalism. In my opinion,  for one thing self-plagiarism is not the same as plagiarism, Lehrer is unlikely to demand that The New Yorker retract his own stories. Still, it’s not a victimless crime. Lehrer’s readers deserve to know whether the stuff he’s representing as new material was previously published. Regardless, his New Yorker editors surely won’t appreciate that he’s been passing off old copy as brand new. 

Lehrer, clearly found it all too easy to Google himself and the material he found what most of us do. He recycled it, again and again in different publications. When his own words seemed inadequate to make a point in his blogs, he borrowed the ideas of other writers as if they were his own. And when if that wasn’t sufficient enough for him he would simply just make up words. Some people, such as myself may ask what’s the big deal in the wake of this controversy. Also, why was it wrong for Lehrer to recycle his own work from one publication to another via Google? After analysing from a scholarly perspective I have accepted two reasons of the misused information's impact. 

First, readers expect the words they are reading are written specifically for them unless they are informed otherwise. To give them words written for another publication cheats them. This compares to the same way that a college student is considered a cheat who submits the same paper to satisfy the requirements of different classes. The second reason this is wrong is legalistic, but important copyright laws. Virtually every issue of every newspaper and magazine published is copyrighted by the publisher, typically a corporation. The articles belong to the publisher, not the writer. For a writer to recycle those words in another publication amounts to plagiarism and the misuse of discourse. It can be concluded that Lehrer isn’t a journalist. Yes, the publications where his work appeared employed journalists. And what he wrote most of the time looked like journalism. Regardless, he didn’t learn the most fundamental lessons of journalism And despite his years of elite education.