Look on the bright side, Knight Foundation. Maybe Jonah Lehrer will use this money for an ethics class. The nonprofit group wrote in a blog post Wednesday that it “regretted” paying disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer $20,000 to speak at a conference. “We started considering Lehrer as a speaker before his plagiarism scandal broke last year,” the Knight Foundation wrote. But, the foundation said, they “accepted the risk” after the scandal broke, thinking that his tale would be “poignant” at a decision-making conference. The group has been widely criticized since Lehrer’s talk Tuesday, especially after Knight Foundation president Erik Wemple described it as “significantly more about [Lehrer] than I had expected.”
