I am less dismayed by Johann Hari’s penchant for plagiarism than fascinated by his puppeteering of the character ‘David Rose’ (sometimes known as ‘David r’ or ‘David r from meth productions’), who Hari created to self-promote and attack others on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Stephen Fry remarked on Twitter maturely (and with admirable loyalty to his friend Hari) regarding the scandal that he (Fry) is “far from perfect” himself. The implication being that none of those casting stones at Hari embody the personification of perfection either and should therefore try to understand. Fry also praised Hari for his “guts and honesty”, which was a bit much considering Hari was apologising for systematic lying which he repeatedly tried to conceal, and then he only did apologise after he had been caught- a good rule of thumb is to treat sincerity of remorse with scepticism when being caught predates the confession. Although perhaps there is some truth to the thought that one sometimes has to be caught for remorseful feelings to make themselves known- after all, do we not all occasionally, employing self-serving bias, justify our own deceitfulness to ourselves when said deceit is succeeding- before the excruciating experience of having the deceit revealed exposes our actions to others and to ourselves.
The plagiarism, whilst being stupid, lazy and rendering all the claims Hari has made in the past of what people have said to him suspect, does at least have a grain of rationality behind it- that for clarity’s sake in his article’s he replaced answers interviewees had given him with their superior attempts to make the same point in their written work or to other interviewers and then led his readers to believe it had been said to him directly. It was unacceptable, but to an extent understandable.....read more
http://www.atthegrapevine.com/wordpress/politics/curious-case-johann-hari
