Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes

[killer b]

he's demonstrably dishonest, and has been exposed very pubically. no-one would want his name on their research.

 

[temper_tantrum]

Well, that's me told.

 

[butchersapron]

He's always going to be linked to this stuff though. Hugh trevor roper was a really good historian, wrote some of the most important immediate post-war stuff on nazi germany, mostly remembered for authenticating the hitler diaries today...

 

[butchersapron]

More.

(They got him first eoin)

 

[Bakunin]

More.

(They got him first eoin)

Well, that should be the final nail in the coffin of Hari's media career. Bad enough that he's been caught out a few days ago for rampant dishonesty, but he's been caught before and seemingly not learned a thing from the experience. Time for him to board the cart of career failure and begin the long and lonely ride to the Tyburn Tree of outright professional oblivion IMHO.

 

[Athos]

More.

(They got him first eoin)

Yeah, but that's just homophobia.

 

[Bakunin]

Ooh, look what I've found. Here's a piece in which Hari lifts no less than 42 quotes from an interviewee's book then bowdlerises them and passes them off as his own. Who'd have thought it? Still, it's an impresive feat to cram that vast an amount of plagiarism into a single piece, if nothing else.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/afghanistan-joya-women

 

[butchersapron]

42 eh. In one interview.

Nearly half of the entire piece consists of words that Joya used in the book. And, just to hammer this home - nearly every quote supposedly given to Hari was in fact taken from the book.

 

[ericjarvis]

New editor for the Indy. An easy way to make an immediate impact would be to sack Hari on his first day.

Oh great. Editor steps down amid a fuss about a dishonest and plagiarising columnist, and they replace him with somebody from the Evening Bloody Standard. That's really going to inspire confidence. It's like sacking a restaurants's chef because some of his staff have simply reheated packet meals, and then replacing him with a branch manager from Macdonalds.

 

[Athos]

Ooh, look what I've found. Here's a piece in which Hari lifts no less than 42 quotes from an interviewee's book then bowdlerises them and passes them off as his own. Who'd have thought it? Still, it's an impresive feat to cram that vast an amount of plagiarism into a single piece, if nothing else.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/afghanistan-joya-women

Just trying to make it clearer for the reader, apparently. You know, more like what the author meant. Though that doesn't explain why he chose to alter them slightly, does it. Hmmmmmm.

 

[butchersapron]

Private school-->oxbridge. Thanks. You've proven our point johann.

 

[Athos]

By his method, I could produce a great interview with Jesus, or Napoleon, or Gandhi, or... well, anyone really.

 

[Athos]

Private school-->oxbridge. Thanks. You've proven our point johann.

Sadly, that does mean that he'll have the social capital to bounce back from this.

 

[butchersapron]

Bit he was from a single mum council estate - not anymore. He'll be safe.

 

[frogwoman]

i wouldn't have thought he'd bounce back from this - not immediately, anyway.

 

[butchersapron]

He's got 20 years of writing shit left. All his mate are on the papers...

 

[Bakunin]

By his method, I could produce a great interview with Jesus, out Napoleon, or Gandhi, or... well, anyone really.

True, I was discussing this last night during one of my many sojourns in the lowermost circles of Hell. Mussolini, himself a former journalist, commented on how standards are clearly slipping in the modern media, while Stalin commented on how the manipulation of the masses was so much easier in the pre-internet age. The Devil's chief of PR, a German gentleman named Goebbels, expressed surprise at someone having an even more flagrant disregard for the truth than he himself possessed during his heyday and, as we sat on the patio of the Hotel Inferno, surveying the endless and eternal fires of damnation while listening to the perpetual screams of the tortured souls of the damned and doomed, Richard Nixon happened to drop by, fixed me with a steely yet shifty glare, grasped me firmly by the shoulder and said:

'Hari may be a pinko Commie subversive. But he's MY KIND of pinko Commie subversive. When he gets down here tell him to give me a call and I might have a job for him...'

 

[Athos]

i wouldn't have thought he'd bounce back from this - not immediately, anyway.

Even if he gets sacked, he'll be in a similar job or better inside a year.

 

[frogwoman]

True, I was discussing this last night during one of my many sojourns in the lowermost circles of Hell. Mussolini, himself a former journalist, commented on how standards are clearly slipping in the modern media, while Stalin commented on how the manipulation of the masses was so much easier in the pre-internet age. The Devil's chief of PR, a German gentleman named Goebbels, expressed surprise at someone having an even more flagrant disregard for the truth than he himself possessed during his heyday and, as we sat on the patio of the Hotel Inferno, surveying the endless and eternal fires of damnation while listening to the perpetual screams of the tortured souls of the damned and doomed, Richard Nixon happened to drop by, fixed me with a steely yet shifty glare, grasped me firmly by the shoulder and said:

'Hari may be a pinko Commie subversive. But he's MY KIND of pinko Commie subversive. When he gets down here tell him to give me a call and I might have a job for him...'

 

[frogwoman]

Even if he gets sacked, he'll be in a similar job or better inside a year.

you're prob right, sadly

 

[Athos]

you're prob right, sadly

Jesus, I feel like LLETSA.

 

[butchersapron]

Dirty Hari: I know what you're thinking. Did I only make up six quotes, or only five?

(Guardian boards)

 

[eoin_k]

(They got him first eoin)

Guido is only a pawn in my game.

 

[gawkrodger]

Dirty Hari: I know what you're thinking. Did I only make up six quotes, or only five?

(Guardian boards)

i laughed

 

[sihhi]

I'm pretty sure he just makes up stuff up in his columns Private Eye exposed this about his visit to Iraq in 2002.

He also misquotes like this attack on Tony Benn

My great worry is that the history of the great and
honourable Labour left – the legacy of Aneurin Bevan, Barbra [sic] Castle and Michael Foot – is being blotted out by the memory of Tony Benn and the appalling damage he inflicted on the Labour Party. This part of the Left
that championed sexual freedom, nuclear disarmament, and the spread of democracy is at risk of being forgotten. The fact that there is now no Labour left worthy of the name is largely due to Benn’s appalling,
egotistical behaviour in the 1980s, which has discredited the parliamentary left for generations. Benn destructively preferred a Labour Party
ideologically pure and forever in opposition to the principled compromises that Bevan and Foot rarely shied away from. He even described the 1983 election – in which Foot and Labour were, thanks to Benn, humiliated and crushed – as “a great victory for Socialism,”.

He purposefully does this. He is Oxbridge smart enough to know Benn is talking about improvements in Labour party democracy in the 1980-1983 period. That's what his degree Social and Political Sciences was about - postwar party politics. He got a first

Back then in July 2003 he was still pro-Iraq war:

"If nuclear weapons continue not only to exist but to
proliferate until every mad regime with a million quid
has a nuke, sooner or later the air of a major city
like London will be thick with ash and smoke and
radioactive poisons."

I emailed him once about the Benn misquoting - nothing.

This is his attack on Noam Chomsky

Just to go back to the markets. He has used the word “bullshit” to describe the idea that markets in any way generate wealth. I believe markets are a tool need to be extremely tightly regulated – markets will have a tendency to do things that are completely unacceptable like abuse workers’ rights or trash the environment, and that’s why you need to have very strict, tight democratic regulations and strong trade unions. But nonetheless, within those regulations and checked strong trade unions, markets do actually do something very important: they generate wealth. Chomsky denies that, and I think, therefore, there is this really big hole in his interpretative framework.
..
I agree there are lots of other reasons why societies become wealthy, but markets are an essential ingredient. Obviously there are market fundamentists like the IMF who take this to an absurd extreme. I thought of a pretty lousy analogy to express this: if you want to make bread, you need yeast. But if you try to eat yeast alone and forget the other ingredients, you only have stinking fungus. The IMF and World Bank are ramming yeast down the throats of the poor – but Chomsky is chucking the yeast in the bin, and saying that nobody who believes in yeast is a defender of the likes of the IMF and World Bank.

He has removed his column from 2001 from his website about how the antiglobalisation movement can lead to massive death.

 

[eoin_k]

The more stuff of his I read the more offensive it seems. In one article he claimed that the anti-globalisation movement was effectively infiltrated by fascists:

Democratic socialists like Tony Benn have tried to claim the anti-globalisation activists as soul-mates - but can a movement of Trots, anarchists and, now, fascists really be one we want to associate ourselves with?

 

[redsquirrel]

Perhaps Meltingpot could come back and explain what exactly it is about the two articles quoted above that make him better than the rest of the hacks.

I mean leaving aside the c&ping ,the articles shihi quotes from are just embarrassingly shit.

 

[love detective]

yeah he's shockingly bad :-

markets do actually do something very important: they generate wealth

as you say plaiglarism aside, the fact that he comes out with crap like the above is completely hatstand

 

[eoin_k]

The anti-globalisation movement has many benign aspirations to enhance participatory democracy and curb corporate power. But it also has some violent and frightening adherents who are capable of the kind of terrorism being visited upon us by Muslim fundamentalists.

 

[revol68]

I don't remember even right wingers claiming the anti globalisation movement was capable of unleashing terrorism like Islamic fundamentalists, they generally just patronised it as silly hippies and leftie rabble rousers.

Hari is such a little cunt, a snivelling little liberal prick, I've always maintained people like him are far worse than conservatives.