Why do journalists risk getting caught in a lie?

Jonah Lehrer

I’m not naive about these things. I know there are reporters out there who make things up. It was only nine years ago, after all, that Jayson Blair resigned from The New York Times after his plagiarism and fabrications came to light.

Still, as a former newspaperman who spent three decades as a reporter and never met a fabricator during all that time, I’m amazed whenever a new case of such journalistic malfeasance comes to light.

Enter Jonah Lehrer, formerly of The New Yorker.

Lehrer recently resigned as a staff writer at that storied publication after admitting that he attributed phony quotes to Bob Dylan in a nonfiction book entitled Imagine. The problem came to light when Michael Moynihan of Tablet, an online magazine, questioned Lehrer about unverifiable Dylan quotes in Lehrer’s book.

“The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes," Lehrer eventually admitted in a statement. “But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.”

Putting aside the “unintentional misquotations” and the “improper combinations” of real quotes, Lehrer admitted that some of the Dylan quotes in his book “did not exist.” That means he made them up, pure and simple.

One would hope a nonfiction writer would be ethical enough not to even consider such a thing, never mind go through with it. Beyond that, though, there are far more practical considerations that should have persuaded Lehrer to abandon the idea as soon as he cooked it up.

Put simply, the risks are too great.

What if Dylan, or someone close to him, stumbled upon the book and discovered the fabrications? What if a musicologist tried to document the quotes? Or a Dylan biographer? And what if (as actually happened) another journalist started poking around?

When Moynihan, a self-described "Dylan obsessive," could not document Lehrer's Dylan quotes, he asked Lehrer about them. Lehrer lied. So Moynihan dug deeper by getting in touch with Dylan's managers to see if they really had given Lehrer access to interview footage, as Lehrer claimed. "They told me that they were unfamiliar with Lehrer, had never read his book,” and could not corroborate the other sources that Lehrer cited, Moynihan wrote.

“Confronted with this,’ Moynihan wrote, “Lehrer admitted that he had invented it.”

Lies beget lies, and a liar digs himself an ever-deeper hole even as he tries to extricate himself from it. Sure, lying is wrong, which should be reason enough for journalists not to do it. But on a more selfish and practical level, it’s also foolish, simply because of the high risk of getting caught.