出版与作家生涯2012slate.com
乔纳·莱勒在 Wired.com 的新闻失当行为
Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com
导读
这篇 Slate 调查报道梳理 Jonah Lehrer 在 Wired.com 的抄袭、引语与事实错误，包括逐段近似他人文字、把新闻稿包装成采访，甚至复制他人同样的数据错误。对写作者而言，它是一份关于引用来源、事实核查和原创表达的反面教材。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
直接借用他人段落、句式和结构，尤其连对方的错误细节也照搬，会成为抄袭的硬证据。
- 02
使用新闻稿或二手材料中的引语时，要如实标明来源，不能改写成仿佛自己直接采访所得。
- 03
数据、人数、实验设置等细节必须回到原始材料核对，避免把二手错误继续传播。
- 04
写自己不真正理解的题材时，读者容易察觉；先建立足够的领域理解再动笔。
HN 评论精选
连他人错误都原样复制，是抄袭的强证据。
评论引用 Slate 的对比：Lehrer 在 2011 年《篮球与爵士乐》中的一段，与 Sharon Begley 三年前写的段落高度平行。两段都写 10 名篮球运动员、10 名教练和 10 名体育记者加新手看罚球视频；Lehrer 还照搬了 Begley 的数据错误——实际只有 5 名教练和 5 名记者，另有 10 名新手，Lehrer 以完全相同的方式犯错。评论结论：当 Lehrer 连别人的错误都复制时，你就明白了。
tokenadult查看英文原文
This one nails Lehrer to the wall: "In a third post from mid-2011 titled "Basketball and Jazz," one of Lehrer's paragraphs closely paralleled one written by Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley some three years earlier. "Lehrer: "The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time. "Newsweek: "In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters (considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw, compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and writers. "Tellingly, Begley misstated the number of participants in the study. (There were only 5 coaches and 5 sportswriters, not 10 of each. In addition, there were also 10 people in the novice group who were neither coaches nor sportswriters.) Lehrer made the exact same mistake in precisely the same manner." When Lehrer reproduces someone else's mistake, you know he isn't looking up or verifying the facts himself. The honorable thing to do in a blog would be simply to link to Begley's piece and say, "Sharon Begley wrote an interesting article a few years ago about a study on this issue." P.S. I posted an article to HN earlier about the initial discovery of Lehrer making up quotations in articles in other publications. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370417 I had also seen him "recycle" earlier writings of his in paid publications, because once one of his articles was submitted here to HN, and I thought, "Hey, I've read this before." Indeed I had, in the previous publication where he had first written on the same subject a couple years earlier.
单一作者案例不能说明行业普遍性，应区分复用自己材料、新闻稿引用和逐字抄袭的严重程度。
这……这是对单一作者做细致分析的结果。医学人士会告诉你，给病人做影像和诊断时的问题之一是会发现异常——不是因为它们与所讨论疾病相关，而是因为个体存在差异。所列举的行为——重复使用自己材料、新闻稿抄袭、抄袭、引语问题、事实问题——在其他作者、记者、专栏作者、随笔作者的无偏样本中有多普遍？其中一些行为具体错在哪里？我没有特别密切跟进 Lehrer 事件，我知道他承认具体伪造了 Bob Dylan 的引语（很糟）。我有点困惑他在“recycling”上为何受指责——本质上就是重复使用自己的材料。文中提到的新闻稿抄袭似乎涉及从新闻稿拿引语，而不是从采访中拿（Lehrer 把它修饰得像直接告诉他的）。更宽松的看法是，新闻稿“告诉”了 Lehrer……也告诉了其他任何读者。不太好，但只是浅灰色。直接引用他人已发表、非新闻稿作品则更黑。不过我想知道 Seife 说“关于新闻稿的新闻规则模糊，关于把其他记者文字据为己有的规则并不模糊”时，依据的是什么具体规则手册。
dredmorbius查看英文原文
So ... this is the result of close analysis of a single author. As medical types will tell you, one of the problems of running imaging and diagnostics on ill / injured / diseased patients is that you'll find anomolies -- not because they're relevant to the illness in question, but because individuals differ. What is the prevalence of the cited behaviors -- recycling, press-release plagiarism, plagiarism, quotation issues, and factual issues -- in an unbiased sample of other authors / reporters / columnists / essayists? What, specifically, is wrong with some of the behaviors in question? I haven't followed the Lehrer situation particularly closely, I'm aware that he's admitted to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan specifically (not good). I'm a bit puzzled as to what he's being faulted for in "recycling" -- essentially reusing his own material. The press-release plagiarism cited appears to involve taking quotes from press releases, rather than interviews (which Lehrer shaded to sound like it had been told him directly). The looser view would be that, well, the pres release "told Lehrer" ... and anyone else reading it. Not great, but a modestly pale shade of gray. Direct quotations of the published, non-press-release works of others is getting rather darker. Though I wouldn't mind knowing what specific rulebook(s) Seife is playing from when he states: "Journalistic rules about press releases are murky. Rules about taking credit for other journalists' prose are not." I mean, I really hope we're not making shit up as we go along (and frankly have no way of knowing if Seife is or isn't -- he's, erm, not citing sources, merely his own authority as a professor of journalism). Seife admits as much later in his piece: "There isn't a canonical code of conduct for journalists; perfectly reasonable reporters and editors can have fundamental disagreements about what appear to be basic ethical questions, such as whether it's kosher to recycle one's own work." He also notes that recycling can be considered common and acceptable practice, though he feels "may violate the reader's trust". My own experience, especially in persuasive writing that's repeated as an author attempts to argue for a position, is that there is considerable recycling of material, though often an author will refine and strengthen arguments over time. That's what I myself practice. Handling quotations also allows for some leeway. It's not uncommon to tidy up tics of speech and grammar particularly from spoken conversational passages. It can, in fact, be a negative shading to quote someone with complete faithfulness and accuracy, including all "ers", "ums", "ahs", and syntactical tangents and fragments. That said, changing meaning in as fundamental a manner as to equate memorizing a few stanzas of an epic work with memorizing the whole thing, and failing to correct it, is pretty bad. At different points in time, attitudes toward what would currently be considered plagiarism in news were radically different. It's very, very helpful to recognize that outside a relatively few fairly stable rules (murder, real property theft), much of ethics and morals is temporally, culturally, and situationally relative. Today we suffer witches to live. In Revolutionary America, plagiarism was common practice (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-andrlik/how-plagiarism-made-ameri_b_1772782.html). My feeling is that too strict an insistence on slavishly faithful accuracy can be as much a liability as confabulation. We know now that war photographers since Brady have staged and arranged subjects in photographs to more effectively tell stories. That NASA image processing often involves significant Photoshop enhancement and visible-range representations of invisible spectra from radio, infra-red, ultra-violet, and X-ray ranges. That NPR extensively edits interview audio, and will even modify "live" host comments over the course of repeats of their anchor news programs Mornin…
写作者需真正理解题材，否则读者能察觉。
我对 Lehrer 有些文章确实喜欢，但常常感觉他并不真正懂自己在说什么。不过大多数流行网络科学作者也差不多。
Alex3917查看英文原文
Meh. There were some of Lehrer's articles that I genuinely liked, but as often as not I got the feeling that he didn't really know what he was talking about. Although that's not unlike most other popular Internet science writers.
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