Ex-New Yorker staffer Jonah Lehrer also recycled, fabricated, plagiarized, breached journalistic ethics at Wired.com

This may not reflect well on Wired.com, either. They backed the study but didn’t publish the full findings. That fell to Slate.

My task was not to decide whether Lehrer got everything right—every journalist makes mistakes and misinterprets things—but to determine whether he recycled, fabricated, plagiarized, or otherwise breached journalistic ethics.

I soon came to the conclusion that he had.

Wired.com decided not to publish my full analysis of my findings, but given the importance and prominence of the Lehrer case, Slate stepped in to fill the gap. Evan Hansen, Wired.com’s editor, declined an opportunity to comment. Update, Aug. 31, 8:32 p.m.:  Wired has issued a statement. Lehrer was asked to comment on the record but has not replied.

Also, via Newser, this doesn’t bode well for any type of rehabilitation for Lehrer.

Seife got to interview Lehrer for 90 minutes about it, but can’t legally quote or even sum up their talk. “But what I can say is that a number of his responses to my questions made me suspect that Lehrer’s journalistic moral compass is badly broken,” writes Seife. One caveat, though: While older reporters had editors vetting their work, Lehrer “rose to the very top in a flash, and … was operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.”

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