Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes

[Bakunin]

...and another one

It's looking increasingly as though this isn't a one-off or even an occasional lapse for Hari. It seems to me that he considers plagiarism and falsifying reportage to simply be a standard practice. I also notice that a certain Ms Penny seems to be keeping very quiet about the whole affair now that Hari has been forced to admit what he's been doing.

 

[killer b]

she said yesterday she didn't condone his interviewing technique (lol), but can everyone leave him alone now 'cause it's getting homophobic.

i must have missed all the homophobic criticisms somehow.

 

[Meltingpot]

OK, but just to continue the analogy with Hari;

Suppose there was a journalist who was doing an expose of the porn industry (and the exploitation etc.) and, assuming the allegations against Hari were true, making up imaginary interviews or copying someone else's without proper acknowledgement.

Other journalists out there were printing stories about how wonderful the porn industry was (knowing full well it wasn't the truth), defamatory lies about campaigners against abuses within the porn industry. joke articles about celebrities shagging other celebs and wannabees, etc.

Would you still think it was worth going after the journalist who was at least trying to report the abuses in the porn industry, as opposed to the others who weren't even trying to provide a fair and accurate picture?

That's all I'm saying here.

Redsquirrel; you're right, I haven't read the Negri article. Maybe I'll get round to it.

 

[frogwoman]

read it then because otherwise you won't really know what the whole thing is about.

 

[Bakunin]

she said yesterday she didn't condone his interviewing technique (lol), but can everyone leave him alone now 'cause it's getting homophobic.

i must have missed all the homophobic criticisms somehow.

To be fair, I'm not sure whether her silence on the subject today is down to her knowing that Hari has been nailed bang to rights (and so she's trying to avoid any guit by association) or simply because of the amount of ridicule she attracted by making accusations of (seemingly non-existent) homophobia.

 

[killer b]

assuming the allegations against Hari were true

they aren't actually allegations are they? that suggests there's some doubt that he did it.

 

[revol68]

IIRC, she's already been subject to accusations of falsifying some of her reportage. At the porn SHAFTA Awards, IIRC.

E2A: Yep, she claimed to have had a conversation with porn director Anna Span, who stated quite clearly that she didn't even attend the SHAFTA Awards. It's a tad difficult to have a conversation with someone who isn't even at the same event, I'd have thought.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/03/porn-industry-sex-hannah

I think she has kept that one ambiguous enough, as part of the piece we will naturally assume it was something said in conversation at the awards but she cleverly not stated it, rather she just reports that Anna Span says such and such. It's dishonest but it's not up there with Hari who fashioned self aggrandising scenarios in which the plagiarised responses were inserted.

 

[Bakunin]

OK, but just to continue the analogy with Hari;

Suppose there was a journalist who was doing an expose of the porn industry (and the exploitation etc.) and, assuming the allegations against Hari were true, making up imaginary interviews or copying someone else's without proper acknowledgement.

Other journalists out there were printing stories about how wonderful the porn industry was (knowing full well it wasn't the truth), defamatory lies about campaigners against abuses within the porn industry. joke articles about celebrities shagging other celebs and wannabees, etc.

Would you still think it was worth going after the journalist who was at least trying to report the abuses in the porn industry, as opposed to the others who weren't even trying to provide a fair and accurate picture?

That's all I'm saying here.

Redsquirrel; you're right, I haven't read the Negri article. Maybe I'll get round to it.

I'm even handed on the subject of plagiarists and liars, personally. I don't care whether they're left wing, centrist, right wing, whatever. Taking other people's work and passing it off as your own is plagiarism. Falsifying reportage (such as claiming to have had a conversation with someone who wasn't even at the same event, for example) is nothing short of outright lying. Anyone who engages in those practices and then claims credibility as a reporter, or even claims to actually BE a proper reporter, is also full of shit as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Fruitloop]

I think she has kept that one ambiguous enough, as part of the piece we will naturally assume it was something said in conversation at the awards but she cleverly not stated it, rather she just reports that Anna Span says such and such. It's dishonest but it's not up there with Hari who fashioned self aggrandising scenarios in which the plagiarised responses were inserted.

That's the thing isn't it. It would be easy enough to say 'So and so says that' and neglect to mention that they said that somewhere else, perhaps with the excuse of brevity. But Hari goes much further and juxtaposes (dubious) details about the interview with the purloined quotes, in a way that seems to be deliberately designed to deceive.

Plenty of journalists get around the problem of spoken vs written words without deception - 'With an audible sigh, Mr X returns to the theme he espoused in his book All about me, that [begin quotes] blah blah blah'. It ain't rocket science.

 

[ericjarvis]

There's one basic issue here. Why is there any possibility of Hari writing falsehoods in a major national newspaper and still having a job? The answer, of course, being that currently no British newspaper gives a toss about whether their journalists write facts or fiction so long as they sell papers and promote the views of the newspaper owner.

 

[lazyhack]

There's one basic issue here. Why is there any possibility of Hari writing falsehoods in a major national newspaper and still having a job? The answer, of course, being that currently no British newspaper gives a toss about whether their journalists write facts or fiction so long as they sell papers and promote the views of the newspaper owner.

A lot of other papers would have fired him the second the charges broke, or asked him to do the right thing. In the states its a much more serious offence to fuck about with quotes, hence Washington Post etc picking up on this. According to an Italian colleague you can potentially be jailed in many European countries for messing about with quotes.

If he has to hand back his Orwell Prize then I can't see how he can hold onto his position - http://mediastandardstrust.org/mst-news/media-standards-trust-response-to-johann-hari-allegations/

As an aside - if you take a look at his claims he bucked a neo-nazi from the Groaner in 2002 and compare it to his article from the Indy in 2006 the guy (Russ Gustavson) suddenly stops being a nazi and becomes an anti-semitic lefty with a black girlfriend, who he didn't buck. Why would you try bed a neo-nazi and more importantly why would a neo-nazi try to bed Hari?

 

[butchersapron]

Not particularly important today but it takes 10 seconds to post it, so, more, loads more here.

 

[TruXta]

Why would you try bed a neo-nazi and more importantly why would a neo-nazi try to bed Hari?

Hate-fuck, wasn't that the idea? Class pic btw.

 

[TruXta]

Not particularly important today but it takes 10 seconds to post it, so, more, loads more here.

You gonna start doing a series on Mel Philips or Delingpole as well?

 

[eoin_k]

This maybe all true but as butchersapron said to me with a wry smile as we shared a coffee and surveyed a now familiar Greek vista of black masks and tear gas, "They didn't fuck with autonomists, they always get their man"

You looking for an Orwell Prize nomination?

 

[Bakunin]

Not particularly important today but it takes 10 seconds to post it, so, more, loads more here.

Well, if any further confirmation were needed that Hari routinely falsifies his copy and routinely steals the work of other writers then then there it is. By any reasonable standards Hari's been proved to be an habitual plagiarist and his professional credibility and integrity (or lack thereof on both counts) have now gone right down the toilet. This will go either one of two ways, IMHO. One is that he's going to end up permanently blacklisted by any half-decent media outlet (I wouldn't be surprised if half the names in his contact book have already jumped ship by now or will as this goes on). The other is that he'll simply drop off the radar until things have blown over, then resurface doing the time-honoured 'I was a naughty boy, but now I've learned my lesson' routine and then try and rebuild from what's left of his career and credibility.

 

[frogwoman]

Not particularly important today but it takes 10 seconds to post it, so, more, loads more here.

possibly find another source tbh

"where islam spreads, freedom dies"

 

[butchersapron]

The site who caught him in this latest slew is undoubtedly shit, but the evidence is there, regardless. It doesn't have to be tied to them. Now that it's public, they're effectively out of the picture. They're now irrelevant as to what hari did or didn't do.

 

[frogwoman]

yeh, you could have picked a better one though !

 

[butchersapron]

There are no other ones. They found the examples.

 

[frogwoman]

Oh, OK. i'm looking through it now ... lol there's tonnes of it!

 

[butchersapron]

I think that one may end up being particularly damning - it seems almost the entire interview was just taken from her autobiography with him adding in descriptions of her doing something physical jusat before inserting the thievery in order to make it look like they came from the interview - a trick common to nearly all of these exposes

 

[frogwoman]

I think that one may end up being particularly damning - it seems almost the entire interview was just taken from her autobiography with him adding in descriptions of her doing something physical jusat before inserting the thievery in order to make it look like they came from the interview - a trick common to nearly all of these exposes

Any more? I wonder why it took him so long to get found out! (although someone said something about it in 2003 iirc?)

 

[phildwyer]

This will go either one of two ways, IMHO. One is that he's going to end up permanently blacklisted by any half-decent media outlet (I wouldn't be surprised if half the names in his contact book have already jumped ship by now or will as this goes on). The other is that he'll simply drop off the radar until things have blown over, then resurface doing the time-honoured 'I was a naughty boy, but now I've learned my lesson' routine and then try and rebuild from what's left of his career and credibility.

I doubt that. I think everyone's making more of this than it really is. I think he'll carry on as usual.

 

[butchersapron]

Any more? I wonder why it took him so long to get found out! (although someone said something about it in 2003 iirc?)

Because people in general didn't know and those who did know (professionally) either did it too or don't care. There was something wrong with that Negri interview that stuck in my craw, stuck in revols, stuck in gawrodgers and others for 7 years plus , there was something very wrong with it (beyond it's shitness i mean), DSG somehow found out what it was. No idea if it was lucky co-incidental reading or what.

 

[frogwoman]

And the people who did complain never got their letter printed it seems ...

 

[eoin_k]

I'm surprised more isn't being made of the material in Private Eye's Hackwatch.

 

[butchersapron]

I'm surprised more isn't being made of the material in Private Eye's Hackwatch.

Yes, and most of that was before the Negi interview. Here i.e his bullshit lies about the death of Carlo Giuliani

(2) In an article on the death of Carlo Giuliani at the G8 summit in Genoa, Hari wrote that "when I saw the scene, I couldn't beleive so much blood had poured from just one body." Private Eye disputed that he was on the scene. "As several witnesses can attest, Hari wasn't there, having hailed a taxi to escape the scene some time before Giuliani was killed," the Hackwatch column stated.

 

[frogwoman]

that's sick to lie about someone's death like that.

 

[phildwyer]

His editor's backed him. His editor's no fool. He's in the clear as far as I can see.