I'm shocked, shocked . . .

An interesting take on the recent controversy regarding the journalist Jonah Lehrer (whose book How We Decide, I enjoyed) and the ethical obligations of a journalist when quoting someone. Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan, and journalistic unquotations by Mark Liberman.

I was shocked to read that Jonah Lehrer had quit his job at the New Yorker, after admitting that he fabricated some quotations from Bob Dylan in his recent book Imagine: How Creativity Works. I was shocked because what Lehrer did is consistent with the standard behavior of journalists, though perhaps not with the official story of what this behavior is supposed to be like. But the actual practice, in which journalists often put between quotation marks whatever representation of a source's opinions they feel that their narrative needs, was validated by judicial decision in a famous case involving another New Yorker writer 25 years ago — someone who is still on the magazine's staff.

Liberman looks at this as an issue of the severity of consequences (Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker) versus the empirical reality that journalists are known to routinely and consciously misquote subjects. He is surprised that Lehrer is taking a fall when we know and expect that the same sin has been committed by many or most other journalists without consequence to them. That is a fair point. But I think it misses the real point though.

I would argue that the issue is not a tactical one regarding whether journalists get their facts right. We all know that to a greater or lesser degree, most journalists get much of their reporting wrong (see You turn the page, and forget what you know discussing Michael Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia effect), including, likely, the quotations.

However, in our modern, volatile, fast-paced and complex environment, we are increasingly dependent on accurate information. We know that much of what we read in the papers (the first draft of history) will be incorrect and we make that allowance. Many of us may be concerned that what we read in the papers is desperately anemic, reflecting a cultural homogeneity of its writers. Much of what is written is dependent on a worldview not shared or validated by the lives of most other people. We make allowances for that as well.

This difference in worldview is frequently cast in left versus right terms but I suspect it is really about the narrowness of the cultural milieu of the writers - they are virtually all from middle-class backgrounds, they are all university educated, they virtually all live in cities, they are all white-collar knowledge workers, and they virtually all earn (the established ones) three or four times more than the average household. They can't help but be rather unrepresentative of the rest of the world as experienced by their readers. They can't help but have assumptions and beliefs not shared by others.

So we make allowances for error and for bias when it comes to individuals responsible for delivering truthful information about complex issues.

What we don't tolerate, and I believe this to be the issue for Lehrer (and Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass, and Michael Bellesiles, etc.) is for the journalist to intentionally mislead us. The noise-to-signal ratio is already too high for most of us. For a journalist to increase it yet further with deliberate inaccuracies or misrepresentations, whether owing to laziness or working in support of some unstated agenda, is a transgression too far.

As we move into this modern connected world of always connected, always on, and an inundation of information, we set greater and greater store upon Trust and Truth. Those whom we trust are expected to tell the truth and those that are found wanting are generally cleansed from the information eco-system. They are no longer trusted to be purveyors of truth.