Many of you might recall when Jo Moore declared that the September 11th attacks were a “good day to bury bad news”, a line that would ultimately cost her a job. She was right of course, right in a very callous way. Johann Hari was critical of her on his blog but I get the distinct feeling he now knows what she means.
The “award winning”, self aggrandising “journalist” who writes for The Independent was only recently caught out for plagiarism. Plagiarism, a cardinal sin if you’re writing an A level essay, let alone a column in a national newspaper is of course a serious accusation and one that he refuted. There was a debate surrounding this mostly precipitated by Hari himself. What he was doing was interviewing people then taking quotes from their books and inserting them as if they were direct quotes. He did this, in his own words, to improve the pieces and ensure their thoughts were communicated correctly.
He admitted it all on his blog, protesting his innocence and pleading ignorance that this was in any way wrong:
“When I’ve interviewed a writer” he wrote “it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech…. So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech.”
Well, even if you debate the need for accuracy in reporting, or the discussion surrounding linguistics, there’s another issue to take into account. By presenting the quotes as if they were being said directly to him this is… Well, a lie. And once a journalist tells a white lie, what else might he be willing to do in the interest of presenting a story. There’s a strong argument, one that all journalists would implicitly understand, that knowingly printing lies is far worse than hacking a phone to obtain a story.
An example of the Hari style of interview can be found below, taken from his column on the 24th September 2010 where he speaks of his time interviewing Gideon Levy:
“After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”
This quote was not some spur of the moment formulation of thought, nor a direct quote to Hari during an intense discussion as described. It in fact comes from an article that was written by Levy six months earlier on haaretz.com.
Why Hari would feel the need to dramatise quotations that were never uttered is alarming and indeed all we can probably verify is that a conversation did take place between the two, then Hari went away and wrote the story he wanted to, complete with cinematic flourishes. This has nothing to do with journalism and is an affront to anyone who takes it seriously.
Still, it looked like an amateurish error, one of a childish writer who had been punching above his weight in contributing to a national publication. His editors had clearly forgiven him, believing the embarrassment of it all had been enough, and even though Hari showed no contrition for his acts – even going so far as to say he spoke to several fellow journalists and they confessed to doing the same – it was likely soon to be forgotten about while the News International developments unfolded.
It didn’t go away then and while the blogosphere deconstructed every article he had written over the last decade another development arose (no pun intended) relating to a mysterious David Rose. The long and short of it – if you have an issue with Hari, you have an issue with Rose and you can fully expect your wikipedia page to be tampered with, or a bad book review on Amazon. Naturally the connection in most people’s minds didn’t take long to make… Hari and Rose had to be one and the same, right? Well, even after the IP on some of the edited entries was traced back to The Independent offices, someone purporting to be Rose came forward and said they were a long-standing friend of Hari and, in a wonderful display of nepotism that the journalism industry thrives on, he had got him some shift work there.
Since then several David Rose’s have come forward, all to strenuously deny they are the one in question, and one who fits the description has yet to be found. If you’re curious about this, don’t be. No-one in their right mind would bet that it’s anyone other than Hari in the face of the evidence. People might well be deterred from saying it of course as Hari, despite claiming to be a proponent of free speech, has threatened non-complimentary bloggers with legal action in the past. That certainly can’t be linked to the identity of Rose but it does illustrate that he is a little, delusional bully, someone who has used his status to further his own agenda and clearly has the time to be everywhere, responding to such trivial matters.
He probably has all this time because it is becoming increasingly clear he makes a lot of his stories up on the fly. While people dug deeper into the links between Hari and Rose, attempting to reveal them as one and the same (something that ultimately only points to him being mentally unhinged rather than someone who is not fit to work in the press) more and more people came forward to say that Hari had misquoted them in his articles. Not only that but in some cases he had attributed ideas and quotes to them that had no bearing on their true thoughts on a subject.
This certainly seems to be the case for his Martha Gellhorn Award winning piece “The Dark Side of Dubai” that was published in The Independent in 2009. After interviewing Ahmed al-Atar, a writer on regional politics, it seemed that he had casually omitted a few details from the piece and added a few that suited the work of fiction he wanted to weave for the benefit of not only making it an entertaining read but also bagging a £5000 prize.
In response to the piece Ahmed was keen to clear up a few things. Such as the venue not being a Starbucks, or him not having an American accent. He didn’t say people supported the government, he didn’t say phone calls were free. He concluded that “He is an irresponsible journalist who has muddled facts and fabricated things.”
He’s right and the signs have been there for a long time. Noam Chomsky had issues with quotes attributed to him by Hari back in 2003 relating to his views (that weren’t his views) that Britain sending troops to Sierra Leone was a genuine, humanitarian intervention:
“I have no idea whether I met him at the lunch, but I certainly didn’t “admit” anything of the sort. Rather, I stated that Britain in Sierra Leone might be an authentic example of humanitarian intervention. And there was no “although”; another flight of the Hari imagination. Rather, I stated that I hadn’t looked into it more closely. The reasons are not his silly inventions — which tell us a lot about him; more below — but rather a moral truism that I have repeated to the point of boredom, and did again at the lunch: a person is responsible for the anticipated consequences of his or her own acts…”
Actually, maybe I should word it like this, for the purposes of making sure Chomsky’s views were clear.
After we put down our glasses Chomsky and I looked at one another and shook our heads softly. “This Johann Hari” I mumbled “what a joke.” It was clear Chomsky agreed and he proceeded to tell me about a time he accused him of speaking out positively about Britain’s intervention in Sierra Leone with a staccato delivery that belied his declining years. “I have no idea whether I met him at the lunch” he recalled “but I certainly didn’t “admit” anything of the sort. Rather, I stated that Britain in Sierra Leone might be an authentic example of humanitarian intervention. And there was no “although”; another flight of the Hari imagination. Rather, I stated that I hadn’t looked into it more closely. The reasons are not his silly inventions — which tell us a lot about him; more below — but rather a moral truism that I have repeated to the point of boredom, and did again at the lunch: a person is responsible for the anticipated consequences of his or her own acts”
Now I’ve never met Noam Chomsky, but what the hell right? You get the message and isn’t that the most important thing?
Anyone with half a brain understands that it isn’t but Hari will likely be adamant that he is in the right. I’m sure David Rose will have a thing or two to say about it as well.
Funnily enough, I had a conversation with some fellow writers not so long ago, after they finally caught up and watched the best TV show to have been made, The Wire. On relating to the journalistic character that rises through the ranks of the Baltimore Sun by lying about his stories, they concluded that could never really happen and was unrealistic, that standards were too high and that the safeguards too many.
The Editor-In-Chief of The Independent came out today and backed Hari claiming the hate aimed against him is mostly “political” in nature. Certainly I care less about him committing career suicide by creating an alter-ego to defame anyone he dislikes or is critical of him, all linked to an e-mail address with a seeming predilection for under age incest pornography. No, I care about two things – first that someone who has one of the most privileged positions in the British press actually upholds the ethics that make the industry worth working in and second that the papers themselves will always hold the truth in higher regard than anything else. The Independent’s decision to stand by Hari shows that they do not care about the second part and I for one will no longer read the paper while he continues to work for them. A two month suspension is clearly a move that shows they hope it will go away in due time. It won’t.
Without the News of The World scandal making the front pages at the moment it would be Hari, and The Independent by backing him, that would single-handedly be dragging journalism through the gutter.
Thanks to all the people out there who dug and wrote about it all to make spouting such opinions easy, especially David Allen Green