• Jonah Lehrer, who had blogged for Wired for several years and was recently hired (and then fired) by The New Yorker, reportedly fabricated quotes and recycled or outright plagiarized parts of articles. While Wired had initially agreed to keep Lehrer on as a features writer, after carefully examining a number of his posts, the magazine just recently decided to end its relationship with him due to his failure to "meet WIRED editorial standards" or to "follow basic good journalism practices." [url]
• Ryan Holiday, marketing director at American Apparel, calls himself a "media manipulator." He wrote a book called "Trust Me, I'm Lying" on how to exploit the media by lying. Even worse, he used Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and pretended to be an expert on pretty much everything -- by lying, of course -- and managed to fool reporters from MSNBC, ABC News, CBS, The New York Times, and more. He claims it was all part of an experiment. [url]
• Margaret Wente has been accused of plagiarism -- copying the words of another Canadian columnist for her own article in 2009 about genetically modified foods in Africa. She has responded to the allegations, but her employers have also disciplined her (without revealing the details of her punishment and obviously not firing her). [url]
• Poynter.org has a wrap-up of the year's journalistic failings (so far) -- which it calls Journalism's Summer of Sin -- and it prescribes some measures for news organizations to prevent (and deal with) plagiarism and fabrication. The year isn't over, though, so place your bets on how many more journalistic fumbles will occur before 2013. [url]

The law must allow "prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider," -- Richard Downing, Justice Department's deputy computer crime chief

“The DoJ is in no way interested in bringing cases against people who lie about their age on dating sites, or anything of the sort. We don’t have the time or resources to do that,”

The logic is simple: When a citizen makes a request pursuant to the FOIA, either implicit or explicit in the request is that it seeks records that are subject to the FOIA; where the only records that exist are not subject to the FOIA, the statement that "there exist no records responsive to your FOIA request" is wholly accurate....

We certainly don't approve of false or misleading political claims, by any candidate or party. But the founders of our democracy left it to the voters, not the courts, to sort fact from fiction.

We find that answers of deceptive executives have more references to general knowledge, fewer non-extreme positive emotions, and fewer references to shareholders value and value creation. In addition, deceptive CEOs use significantly fewer self- references, more third person plural and impersonal pronouns, more extreme positive emotions, fewer extreme negative emotions, and fewer certainty and hesitation words.

lying executives tend to overuse words like "we" and "our team" when they talk about their company. They avoid saying "I."

For instance, in 2002 NPR interviewed Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar, who later went to prison for securities fraud, about his company's auditing practices.

Here's what he said: "There's no one out there today in the world of public companies who has the former chief accountant for the SEC running their audit committee. We do. There's no one out there who has the pre-eminent governance leader, professor [Jay] Lorsch, for example, running their governance committee. We do."

In other words, Kumar was asked, "Can your books be trusted?" And he replied by saying, "We hire the very best auditors." Larcker says that can be a big warning sign.

"If all my speech is 'fantastic,' 'superb,' 'outstanding,' 'excellent' and all my speech sounds like a big hype -- it probably is," Larcker says.