Unoriginal sins
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August 1, 2012
A few years ago I wrote a speech for a Jewish men’s club. It went over pretty well, so I decided to share the gist in the column I wrote for that week’s paper. (It’s hard enough coming up with one good idea per week, let alone two.) A few days later I got an irate e-mail from a member of the men’s club, chastising me for recycling my insights in the paper. “I thought we were getting exclusive material,” he wrote.
It was, I joked at the time, the first time I had ever been accused of plagiarizing myself.
It turns out, however, that recycling your own material can get you in trouble — if you do it in forums that are big enough and prestigious enough. A number of weeks back, the hotshot science writer Jonah Lehrer was accused of recycling, verbatim, material he had written for the Wall Street Journal in his debut entries for a blog at The New Yorker. Journalists debated whether this was a felony or a misdemeanor — or no crime at all. Lehrer’s editor was miffed: “We’re not happy,” he told a reporter.
Still, Lehrer held on to his staff writer job at The New Yorker — until this week, that is, when he was caught in a much larger journalistic fraud. Lehrer was accused — by a writer for the Jewish on-line magazine Tablet — of fabricating Bob Dylan quotes in his bestselling book Imagine: How Creativity Works. When confronted with the charge, Lehrer lied about it, and then admitted he lied. “The lies are over now,” he said in a statement. “I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.” His publisher is recalling the book.
Compared to the News Corp. scandal — featuring phone hacking, illegal surveillance, and bribery — Lehrer’s misdeeds seem like small change. Because Lehrer is young and successful — at 31 he has three books under his belt — there is also a degree of schadenfreude attached to his rise and fall. I understand how young writers, with pressure to live up to the confidence put on them by major publishers, might be tempted to cut corners or shave points. I am willing to consider the possibility of genuine mistakes. But I don’t understand why they think they won’t get caught. Twenty years ago you could plagiarize or make stuff up in the confidence that no one would be able to do an instantaneous search across vast storehouses of data — and even then, there was Lexis/Nexis. In the age of Google, there’s nowhere to hide.
On the moral scale, lying about your sources and inventing quotes is very bad; recycling your own work is bad, but forgivable. I don’t have a problem with (ahem) writers who turn their work into speeches and vice versa. Occasionally, I have quoted myself in things I have written. I wouldn’t adapt something I’d previously written if I felt there was overlap between audiences. Luckily, I don’t have a huge readership.
I invariably give credit for the insights I’ve borrowed, and actually offer citations in conversation — for example, if I share a joke, I reflexively mention where I got it from: “as Louis C.K. says” or “it’s like what Homer Simpson says about doughnuts….” I do this because I’m ethical, yes, but also because it highlights the jokes I consider original.
Plus, I hate people who steal jokes. First, it’s false advertising — like the Hollywood actresses whose singing voices were dubbed in the old musicals. Second, it devalues the gifts of people who are genuinely witty. And third, it amounts to an act of theft, robbing the original author of the credit for an idea he or she shaped out of language and imagination.
Finally, plagiarizing — your own work or anybody else’s — is corrupting. “Mitzva goreret mitzva, avera goreret avera” is the appropriate mishna in this regard — one mitzva leads to another, one sin leads to another. If you get away with small transgressions, you convince yourself you can get away with larger ones. One day you’re too lazy or busy to write something new, the next day you’re too lazy or busy to research and cite the actual quote.
I have heard rabbis debate the ethics of either recycling their own material or “borrowing” their material from others. Rabbis feel pressure to come up with fresh material week after week, and some congregations demand originality.
I don’t see a problem with occasional recycling, so long as they don’t inflict the same sermons over and over. As for cribbing material from other sources — the Jewish tradition is a long conversation among rabbis and thinkers, each building on the ideas of others. Quoting another’s work is not the sign of a slacker, but of a great teacher There is no shame, and actually great merit, in sharing a quote, insight, or argument so long as you give proper citation. (I like the Hebrew phrase “Baruch she’kevanti” [“Blessed is he who guided me”], which is the verbal equivalent of a footnote.)
As I always say, “Anyone who says a statement in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world.”
Oh wait — that was Ethics of the Fathers, chapter 6, verse 6. Baruch she’kevanti….
Andrew Silow-Carroll is Editor-in-Chief of the New Jersey Jewish News. Between columns you can read his writing at the JustASC blog.
Comments
Dan Bloom
August 01, 2012
There’s not wrong with recycling one’s ideas in speeches or published articles ... as long as one is careful to tell the readers or audience—“as I said in an earlier article published a year ago QUOTE UNQUOTE” or “as I said in a speech last week at the men’s club, “quote unquote”..”
The Jonah Lehrer story should be a cautionary tale for all writers and…readers. But guess what, Andrew, given the human psyche, this will happen again, next year, the next, another well-educated writer will get caught being unethical in those kinds of ways Mr Lehrer got caught at. All the journalism classes and all the ethics classes in the world won’t change human nature: some people lie, and cheat and steal, it’s that’s simple. G-d has nothing to do with it. But He should!
Jane Somerville
August 02, 2012
The author of this article seems to be ignoring these damning facts:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/107779/jonah-lehrers-deceptions
Excerpt:
Over the next three weeks, Lehrer stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied to me. Yesterday, Lehrer finally confessed that he has never met or corresponded with Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager; he has never seen an unexpurgated version of Dylan’s interview for No Direction Home, something he offered up to stymie my search; that a missing quote he claimed could be found in an episode of Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” cannot, in fact, be found there; and that a 1995 radio interview, supposedly available in a printed collection of Dylan interviews called The Fiddler Now Upspoke, also didn’t exist.
The press should be profiling the intrepid reporter Michael Moynhian for exposing Lehrer for lying and for his lack of ethics.
Abba
August 06, 2012
What facts is the author ignoring? he wrote:
“Lehrer was accused — by a writer for the Jewish on-line magazine Tablet — of fabricating Bob Dylan quotes in his bestselling book Imagine: How Creativity Works. When confronted with the charge, Lehrer lied about it, and then admitted he lied.’
Here’s a profile of Moynihan:
http://observer.com/2012/07/michael-c-moynihan-jonah-lehrer-bob-dylan-07302012/
Michael Lesher
August 07, 2012
This column is well written and well argued. Wouldn’t it be a good time, therefore, to apply its teaching to Alan Dershowitz, whose massive covert borrowings from the discredited Joan Peters constituted only a fraction of the intellectual sins contained in his “The Case for Israel”? Here the misrepresentations concerned not a popular artist but a burning political issue, and one of great relevance to New Jersey Jewish News. What’s more, Dershowitz—far from being forced out of his job for his fraudulent scholarship—is as vociferous as ever.