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Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes

I actually enjoyed some of his columns on the rare occasion that I read the Indy.

Like this quote "When I hear people ranting about chavs, I want to lock them on a council estate with £100 a week and three kids" (see how easy it is to quote, Johann?) from this article suggests his heart is in the right place. Which was quickly negated by his bizarre support of the Iraq war.
 
butchersapron said:
It sure is. They've just gobbed in all their readers tea and told them to drink it up.
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well, if twitter is any indication of the opinions of the readers of the independent (and i think this is one of the rare occasions where it probably is representative of something), they aren't buying it.
 
I knew you'd say that! And you're right, it is. But if you glance over the offending post again at post 1022 you'll see that I spoke in the past tense. I enjoyed some of his columns before all this came about. If he ever writes again, which seems questionable, I doubt I'd take it in the same respect. But when I did read them this shit storm hadn't gathered.
 
Citizen66 said:
My case was, compared to the majority of mainstream pundits, he doesn't have an anti-working class agenda. Or doesn't appear to.
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He does, just a Labour anti-w/c one- strong supporter of Labour's welfare-to-work programme/reforms.

Only strong deep revolutionary change will wash away the Independent's crimes.
 
sihhi said:
He does, just a Labour anti-w/c one- strong supporter of Labour's welfare-to-work programme/reforms.

Only strong deep revolutionary change will wash away the Independent's crimes.
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Fair enough. I've only read the odd article on the rare occasions I've been in possession of an Indy; I'd never choose him as my specialist subject on mastermind.
 
NOBODY_EXPECTS_THE_SPANISH_INQUISITION!.jpg


Where has Iggie gone? I was enjoying Butcher's inquisition?
 
Good response here

If this had happened in one interview, with only three quotes, the first option might be just about plausible. But the sheer scale of stolen quotes in Hari’s work suggests otherwise. Here’s an excerpt from Jon Lee Anderson’s 2001 interview with Hugo Chavez in the New Yorker:
‘“It is possible I have something of this . . . tragic sense of life,” he [Chavez] acknowledged. He recalled that on the eve of the 1992 rebellion he had said goodbye to his wife and three children, and led his soldiers out of their barracks. He was the last to leave. After locking the big front gate, he threw away the key. “I realized at that moment that I was saying goodbye to life,” Chávez said. “So it is possible that one has been a bit . . . imbued with that . . . ever since, no?”’​
And here’s Hari’s ‘exclusive interview’ with Chavez from 2006:
‘The spectre haunting Latin America – the spectre of Hugo Chavez – furrows his big, broad brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die. “I will never forget – in the early hours, I said goodbye to my wife and three little children. I kissed them goodbye and blessed them.” He knew in his gut he was not going to survive that long, bloody day in 1992, when he and his allies finally decided to stage a revolution against the old, rotten order loathed by the Venezuelan people. “I realized at that moment that I was saying goodbye to life,” he says, looking away. “So it is possible that, after surviving, one has been a bit... imbued with that sense ever since, no?”’​
.......​

what about Hari’s accounts can we trust? If some of the quotes in his articles are not the words Hugo Chavez or George Michael or Ann Leslie or Malalai Joya said to him, which ones are? How do we know that the bits in between the quotes are accurate? If Hugo Chavez gave Hari a garbled version of the same thing he said to Anderson, did he also look away when doing so, as Hari claims he did? How about the part when Chavez patted Hari on the knee – did that really happen, or is it simply dramatic effect to heighten the interesting quotes he has stolen? Once you start reading Hari’s interviews and taking away the plagiarized quotes, you realize that there’s very little of substance left to the articles, but much melodramatic looking away, cigarette-smoking and knee-patting from the subjects. The details of body language he uses to surround so many of his plagiarized quotes don’t suggest a writer searching for clarity in order to offer an X-ray of his subjects’ ‘finest thoughts’, but rather one who has deliberately and systematically misled his readers.

I fear Johann Hari’s latest apology is, rather like his last two, both manipulative and self-serving. If he is serious about regaining the respect and trust of his readers perhaps he should start by detailing, in The Independent or elsewhere, precisely which articles he did this with, to what extent, and be honest about why he did it. Taken as a whole, the plagiarism that has been discovered so far points to far worse than the occasional theft of prior quotes for the sake of clarity, but instead someone who has plagiarized major parts of many of his interviews, for over a decade. There are also still serious questions about whether he has fabricated both quotes and incidents in his articles on Dubai, the Central African Republic and Iraq.
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He was nominated for being journalist of the year by the British Press Awards and won an Amnesty International Britain National Newspaper Media award (not Journalist of the Year) in 2010! All awards ceremonies should be swept away.

One interesting thing about the affair is that he has posted several thousand posts in Wikipedia mostly lying and spinning about himself with several alternative IP numbers - one from work, one from laptop, one from home - who knows?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...imit=500&target=David+r+from+meth+productions

A sample

Hari sockpuppet said:
(another user) inserted into his entry fictitious claims he went to the most exclusive public school in Britain when in fact his father is a bus driver, and, most crucially, inserted poorly sourced and legally disputed claims that he "fabricated" a story he wrote about. ... Private Eye. This is a British scandal magazine, which Hari was attacked by literally a week after he criticised its editor in print. One wiki administrator has said on this page it should be viewed with "a very jaundiced eye", another has said it is "at best 50 percent accurate", yet Felix is insisting on using it as a source. This fails both BLP and NOTE, since Private Eye attacks virtually all prominent journalists sooner or later.
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Johann Hari in fact attended John Lyon School, a private school in North West London.
http://www.isc.co.uk/school_TheJohnLyonSchool_Harrow.htm

Private Eye exposed Hari's lying early on in with an article called "Hari's Game" that the Hari sockpuppets were desperate not to have/remove from Hari's Wikipedia. So he knew he was lying early on and he could get found out, but carried on lying and lying to stop it appearing on his wiki entry that anyone suspected him of lying.

He used a total of five sockpuppets to carry out these edit wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego..._sockpuppets_of_David_r_from_meth_productions
 
Just wondering, I doubt the assertion that the Indy kept Hari because they needed to, to hang onto readers. It explained their having him in the first place, but not post-scandal, no.
He's staying because he wants to (clearly). Which makes me think ... Wondering if he's got some kind of angle, employment-law wise, which gave him leverage to cling on? Duty of care? Not adequately supervised/managed? Does anyone know enough to comment?
 
temper_tantrum said:
Just wondering, I doubt the assertion that the Indy kept Hari because they needed to, to hang onto readers. It explained their having him in the first place, but not post-scandal, no.
He's staying because he wants to (clearly). Which makes me think ... Wondering if he's got some kind of angle, employment-law wise, which gave him leverage to cling on? Duty of care? Not adequately supervised/managed? Does anyone know enough to comment?
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Nah, he hasn't got a leg to stand on. I haven't seen their P&Ps but I imagine it's gross misconduct.
 
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