Private Eye
In its 23 March-3 April 2003 edition, the satirical British magazine Private Eye questioned the credibility of some of Hari's reporting. Two weeks earlier Hari had criticised the magazine's editor Ian Hislop and Jeremy Paxman as being "sneerers who make their living out of deriding those who actually do something". (What exactly Hari was referring to is not clear). [3]
The Hackwatch column made three allegations about Hari’s journalistic practices: [4]
- In a July 2001 column in the New Statesman Hari mentioned that he had used ecstasy after finishing his final university exams. Other media outlets subsequently ran articles by Hari including one in which he wrote "I'll try to explain why so many of us use the drug weekly". Hackwatch column stated that "In fact, the young rascal had never taken Ecstasy: before writing his lyrical account he had to phone a friend and ask what it felt like".
- 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.
- In a January 10 2003 column Hari backed the need for the invasion of Iraq. "Who, you may be asking incredulously, would want their country to be bombed? What would make people want to risk their children being blown to pieces? I thought this too until, last October, I spent a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein," he wrote. "... If Britain were governed by such a man, I would welcome friendly bombs - a concept I once thought absurd. I might be prepared to risk my own life to bring my country's living death to an end. Most of the Iraqi people I encountered clearly felt the same. The moment they established that I was British, people would hug me and offer coded support (they would be even more effusive towards the Americans I travelled with). They would explain how much they "admire Britain - British democracy, yes? You understand?", Hari continued...read more
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Johann_Hari#Private_Eye
This year saw two major scandals in the British media. The one that received the most attention concerned cell-phone “hacking” by a private detective hired by the now-shuttered News of the World. Such illegal private espionage has been a practice of other tabloid newspapers—including the left-wing Daily Mirror and the paleoconservative Daily Mail—but the outcry focused on papers owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Atlanticist, free-market, and populist ethos has long infuriated the British media and political establishment.
The second scandal involved the exposure of Johann Hari, the celebrated young columnist and media personality, as a plagiarist, fabricator, and user of Internet aliases to carry out smear campaigns against his enemies and to promote his own career. The Hari affair provoked less consternation—though it arguably offers as troubling a picture of the state of British journalism as the hacking scandal does. Indeed, the response to the scandal from Hari’s employers at the Independent and from much of the media establishment was arguably even more revealing of a deficit in the ethics of British media culture than were Hari’s original derelictions.
Like several rising stars in American journalism over the past three decades—the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke in the early 1980s, the New Republic’s Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass in the 1990s, and the New York Times’s Jayson Blair in the early 2000s—Hari, now just 31, achieved his rapid success at a startlingly young age in large part thanks to his deceptions and fabrications. These went undetected for a long time because editors chose not to examine his work too closely. In Hari’s case (as in the case of Glass), his editors did not check his work because he skillfully played to their prejudices, in particular their anti-Americanism and loathing of Israel....read more
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/dirty-hari/
Commentary magazine, an influential American monthly, has published an excellent article by the Anglo-American journalist Jonathan Foreman on the humiliations suffered by the British media.
Until this year, Anglophile Americans managed somehow to excuse our tabloid excesses as "enthusiastic" coverage, and press intrusion as a "celebrity craze". But the two scandals that broke out in 2011 – Hackgate and Harigate – have exposed Britain's media as mendacious and deeply biased. Interestingly, Foreman maintains that it is not Hackgate that strikes Americans as the most outrageous flouting of media ethics; they simply can't get over the Hari whitewash.
Johann Hari's rise and fall could have happened in America, too. Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair: these young journalists were all similarly exposed as plagiarists....read more
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100121232/us-magazine-argues-johann-hari-is-getting-away-with-it-because-he-is-anti-israel-and-anti-usa/
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
