on Lehrer and Zakaria crashing and burning

In case you haven't been following the stories, in a nutshell:

Wunderkid builds an astonishingly successful career by writing gripping and comprehensible accounts of contemporary neuroscience. In a handful of years, he goes from writing a blog to being hired as a staff writer by the New Yorker. But as his star rises, Jonah Lehrer starts recycling old content of his and repackaging it as new work: then someone looks at his most recent books and realizes he's been making up Bob Dylan quotes. No more New Yorker staff position.

Indian-American editor becomes a widely-respected pundit and opinion writer, shaping the national conversation on foreign affairs through his numerous columns, TV appearances and other media engagements. He was the editor of Newsweek, is currently one of the faces of CNN and Time Magazine, and is regarded as a consistently informed voice of reason. But in Fareed Zakaria's most recent Time column, an entire paragraph was lifted almost word-for-word from a New Yorker piece by Jill Lepore. After a brief hiatus, and other claims of plagiarism that have been debunked, he's been reinstated by Time and CNN.

Now, it's not surprising that people are lazy and unethical. I mean, hello, have you met humanity? It's not surprising that successful and well-respected individuals would make profound moral errors. Or that they would fail on a professional level: after all, this isn't a political scandal, where the moral lapse is often peripheral to the life's work. This is an indictment of both personal ethics and professional ability, and throws a whole body of writing into question.

And unfortunately, it's not surprising to see respected journalists thoroughly discredited: I wish it were, because trustworthiness is about the only capital professional journalists have left, and these high-profile embarrassments are very bad for business. But, alas, it's not surprising at all.

But in two other ways, these cases are downright shocking.

First, both Lehrer and Zakaria failed so dramatically at the kinds of tasks that are normally their biggest strengths. Lehrer's brilliance lay in taking the complicated facts of reality and making them into an approachable narrative. Complex truths were his bread and butter. Why on earth would he ever invent a simple, amateurish lie?

Zakaria had a distinctive voice and was renowned for his breadth of knowledge. He was virtuosic at expressing, in unique words, a well-informed position: yet he stole the words, the knowledge, and the opinion of another thinker.

It would have made more sense the other way around; if Lehrer, who often wrote about other people's research, had swiped some citations, and if Zakaria, fond of a well-placed snappy turn of phrase, had made up a quote when the right one didn't exist. That would be them falling victim to their weaknesses. But instead, their failures map perfectly onto their strengths.

And more fundamentally, I am a little shocked that they were both so phenomenally stupid. I mean, seriously: making up a BOB DYLAN quote? It's lazy, unethical and an absolute journalistic failure to make up a quote from Mildred Brown of Little Pebbletown, Florida. It's firecracker-up-your-butthole stupid to make up a quote from Bob Dylan.  That's like saying, "Oh, I'll make up the title of a Phish song," or "oh, I'll invent some details of this Civil War battle." What kind of idiot fabricates a fact when there's a massive community of people completely obsessed with the thing you're fudging?

(An internationally-famous Rhodes Scholar nonfiction author, that's what kind of idiot).

And Zakaria... really, did you think the readership of Time and the New Yorker contains no overlaps? That people interested in gun control would not read both your column and Lepore's article with close and careful attention? We live in the Google age, my friend. All you have to think is "huh, that sounds a little familiar," and the case is practically closed. There was no universe in which you would not get caught.

These are both men who were supposed to be smart. These are men defined by their intelligence, and rewarded richly for it, with money and prominent bylines and an opportunity to have an enormous impact on a nation's intellectual life. They have been Professionally Intelligent for YEARS.

How on earth could they possibly be so stupid?