On Tuesday, Jonah Lehrer, the bestselling author and former New Yorker writer, gave a remarkable speech to the Knight Foundation. Titled “My Apology,” Lehrer’s talk was largely a mea culpa for the journalistic sins he committed and then lied about, which were uncovered last summer by Michael Moynihan in Tablet Magazine. “I am the author of a book on creativity that contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes,” Lehrer explained. “I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking, without credit or citation, an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I also plagiarized from myself.” He went on to say that he was “profoundly sorry.”

It’s safe to say that observers were somewhat less than blown away by the speech. “Jonah Lehrer boring people into forgiving him for his plagiarism,” read one representative tweet. Much of the criticism focused on the extraordinary decision of the Knight Foundation (whose mission is to “support transformational ideas that promote quality journalism”) to pay Lehrer $20,000.

Notwithstanding the tut-tutting about his paycheck, the overarching narrative—the erstwhile star falling to earth, the media delighting in his crash, the lip-biting apology—could have been pre-written by any Oprah viewer or Lance Armstrong fan. More important was what this going-through-the-motions routine elided: Lehrer's entire method was dishonest and lazy.

In fact, the entire scandal reveals something rotten about the gotcha culture of the modern media, which has a much easier time focusing on something quantifiable like plagiarism than grappling with the question of whether something is any damn good. Rather than wondering whether or not Lehrer’s apology was suitably abject, commentators should have pondered the disturbing trends that made Lehrer such a phenomenon before his downfall. Or, to put it another way, there is something odd about a culture that becomes appropriately moralistic about lying but sees no problem with selling a book by saying, “the color blue can help you double your creative output.”

I reviewed Lehrer’s book, Imagine, for The New Republic in June, before Moynihan discovered the plagiarism. If I had known of Lehrer’s deceptions before writing my piece, I would have tried to argue that the book would have been just as absurd and nonsensical even if every word of it had been true. (The Dylan chapter is only one small part of the book.) The fact that such a shoddy piece of work could be written by such an ostensibly serious writer is somehow more disturbing than the knowledge that an overconfident journalist invented several quotes.