The Facts Are Good Enough
Posted: August 10, 2012
[caption id="attachment_10388" align="alignright" width="199"]
© kbuntu - Fotolia.com[/caption]There are times you might be tempted to "add" to a quote or a story to make it more exciting, but you should think twice before doing so. Protect your integrity and that of your writing by sticking to the facts.
[caption id="attachment_10388" align="alignright" width="199"]© kbuntu - Fotolia.com[/caption]There are times you might be tempted to "add" to a quote or a story to make it more exciting, but you should think twice before doing so. Protect your integrity and that of your writing by sticking to the facts.
A New Yorker staff writer and best-selling author recently joined the rogues’ gallery of prose practitioners who decided that because the facts aren’t good enough, embellishment is necessary — and who, by doing, so, erode the already endangered social status of writing.
Jonah Lehrer — already in hot water at the New Yorker for incorporating some of his previously published material into articles for the magazine — admitted last week that he fabricated quotations in his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.
Print and e-book copies of the book, which has already sold 200,000 copies and was a New York Times best-seller and top-ranked on Amazon.com, have been pulled from distribution. Lehrer, who ironically once wrote in the New Yorker about the science of failure (and whose name is German for “teacher”), resigned from the magazine. Like most individuals who have been part of an early twenty-first-century wave of high-profile literary fabricators and plagiarists, his promising career as a writer is over.
I’ll leave the psychology of motivation for such invention to others to analyze. What I found pertinent to this website is the part of an article about Lehrer’s transgression that made reference to criticisms that book publishers do not double-check facts.
One of the fundamentals of journalism is veracity in reporting, and most periodical publications consider assiduous research and fact-checking integral to professional reporting and writing. Some professionally produced publications — including mostly magazines but some newspapers as well — employ staff or freelancers responsible for conducting research and contacting sources to verify quotations and quantifiable information, even though it is the reporter or writers responsibility to submit accurate content.