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August 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
It’s remarkable to me that someone who grew up professionally in the context
of my scandal could make such a similar set of colossal mistakes. But I am
sure Janet Cooke would have said the same thing to me.
Part of Jonah Lehrer’s problem had to be his success. At 31, he already has
three popular books to his name, and countless articles and a prestigious
Rhodes scholarship; it would have been difficult for anyone to doubt his
journalistic integrity. But success, of course, brings with it the pressure
to make each new publication better than the last. It is a pressure that
exists in few places as intensely as it does in a newsroom. Like a Wall
Street trader who is only as good as his last deal, a journalist is often
measured by the breadth, exclusivity, eloquence, and reportage of his last
story. Surely it is no different when writing bestsellers.
The original revelation last month, that Lehrer had reused his own material in
his New Yorker column without acknowledgment, was the first drop of blood in
the water. For me, it came when a former colleague, Macarena Hernández, made
a call to my editors at The New York Times alerting them that she believed I
had plagiarized one of her articles. The plagiarism was blatant, but just as
Lehrer said he regretted the duplication of his own copyrighted material, I
tried to minimize what I’d done by saying that I had accidentally mixed my
notes up with an article by Hernandez that I had copied into a Word file off
the Internet.
I can remember my heart pounding like it never had before, panic setting in,
and then sheer terror at the thought that I had violated the trust of my
family and thesine qua non of my beloved profession.
But once Lehrer owned up to that first revelation, everything else that he did
came into question. Facts, attribution, and quotations are looked at with
jeweler’s eye rather than reading glasses. That’s what happened in 2003,
when then-Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (now the Washington
bureau chief at The Daily Beast) began to dig.
As Lehrer did, I used smoke, mirrors, and deflection, but eventually my
defenses collapsed as the additional allegations rolled in. It may sound
funny coming from me, but I have to say fabricating quotes by Bob Dylan, who
barely speaks publicly, was about as foolish as my fabricating quotes from
prominent figures such as Jessica Lynch’s father.
Some might say our offenses are not comparable, but remember that nine years
ago, the Internet was not as powerful a resource—or temptation—as it is
today. It’s so much easier to plagiarize under pressure today, and so much
easier to catch people doing it. Perhaps, if Lehrer had being doing this in
2003, he could’ve gotten away with it for much longer. (And we still don’t
know the full scope of what he’s done.)
I still don’t understand how I could have been so foolish (my undiagnosed
manic depression probably played a minor role in that equation), but I can
understand Lehrer’s desperate attempts to cover for himself: it’s hard to
face the prospect of your professional reputation crumbling, and it’s hard
to let go even when you know the whole thing is coming down.
At The New Yorker, where editors and fact-checkers are no doubt combing
through all of Lehrer’s work, there is probably a wrenching amount of
soul-searching going on. In a profession built on trust, no one wants to
believe that their colleague and friend could have betrayed them like this.
But however often it happens, journalists still seem to think it won’t
happen to them. As I said in a 2009 speech at Washington and Lee University,
“As FBI profilers and forensic psychiatrists will tell you, recognizing that
anyone is capable, under the right circumstances, of anything, is the first
step to guarding against the evil from within.”
We make the mistake of believing, as I said then, that “if we merely believe
that only bad people do bad things, then you good people have no reason to
learn ethics at all, for you are destined to do good no matter what happens.
This seems contrary to everything we know about the human condition.”
Lehrer has taken the honorable way out by falling on his sword, sparing the
magazine from much additional trauma that is largely connected to him.
Lehrer now has a lot of explaining to do to his colleagues, friends, and
family, tears to shed, humility to absorb, and he now must enter the strange
land of going from the journalistic hunter to the hunted. Perhaps most
difficult, he will have to come to grips with the self-inflicted wound that
removes him from a profession that by all accounts he loved.
Of course I am biased on this topic, but I believe he deserves a shot at
redemption. I work now as a life coach in Northern Virginia, putting the
lessons I learned to use in helping others. I hope Lehrer gets a second
chance somewhere, but for now he needs to reflect on what he has done and
how he can repair the damage.
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