Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee. If (for example) a person doesn't speak very good English, or is simply unclear, it may be better to quote their slightly broken or garbled English than to quote their more precise written work, and let that speak for itself. It depends on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon. Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I'm trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritised the former. That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn't clear to the reader.
Personally, I found the apology to be a bit more of a justification than anything, but as Hari's rejection of plagiarism and churnalism was in tune with what I wrote on Tuesday, and as he apologised and admitted he was wrong, I was willing to let that be the end of it, at least until Hari publishes his next piece, which will presumably be thoroughly vetted first by his editors (which no longer include Simon Kelner), and then by his critics.
But by this time, some of those critics had had time to go back through more of Hari's work, and what emerged was not a picture of occasionally or 'in some instances' finding a more accurate quote for a badly expressed thought. Blogger Cheradenine Zakalwe got the ball rolling by comparing Hari's 2009 interview with Malalai Joya with her memoir Raising My Voice. Zakalwe's work was picked up by author Jeremy Duns, who pointed out that in addition to the 42 quotes lifted in whole or in part from Joya's book, there were also passages which appeared not as quotes from her but as Hari's own writing. The New Statesman's Guy Walters reported Dunn's findings and mentions similar problems with Hari's 2004 interview with Ann Leslie. Blogger Guido Fawkes posted that Hari was sacked from both Cambridge University's student newspaper in 1999 and as a writer for GQ for embellishing stories. The Council for the Orwell Prize announced that it was investigating the situation further.
A lot of the controversy has centred around whether what Hari did should actually be called plagiarism. On Tuesday, I wrote that it shouldn't. On Friday, I changed my mind. Not only is some of what Hari did actually textbook plagiarism - as in, taking words that Malalai Joya wrote and passing them off not even as quotes from her, but as his own writing - I believe that the sheer extent of Hari's so-called 'cleaning up' of quotes goes beyond the courtesy he and his defenders try to pretend he was doing the reader and the interviewee. Where quotes were taken from earlier interviews, I feel Hari was plagiarising not the words of the interviewee but the work of the interviewer, who had to ask the right questions and take the time to record/transcribe/parse through their interview to include the quote in their story. Hari didn't only pretend that the quote was said to him - he also pretended that he put in all of the work that's involved in getting that quote from the interviewee's mouth to the page.
What I've found most bizarre about this whole thing is the defences that have emerged for Hari in mainstream media, all of which seem to deliberately treat Hari's practice as barely worse than just removing ums and ahs from a transcript. The Independent's C J Schuler posted a blog on Tuesday calling the accusations against Hari 'extraordinarily naive'; Schuler, for some reason, maintained that Hari was likely a victim of authors who trot out the same anecdotes and thoughts over and over on book tours, often in the same words. Schuler seemed to have missed Hari's own admission earlier that day, which showed this was clearly not the case.
The Guardian's Mark Lawson wrote a seemingly well-intentioned piece yesterday, which suggested that journalists should use the controversy as an opportunity to reassess their own methods. However, Lawson's article ignores the developments in the story, falls back on Schuler's bit about media-savvy authors repeating themselves, and basically dismisses what Hari did as 'being too kind' to interviewees by giving them the opportunity to be quoted at their best. 'A small sin,' he says, 'in comparison to the numerous media interviews that choose to cruelly distort what was actually said in the interest of news value, malice or political purchase.' Ah yes, the old, 'sure this was wrong but what about this other thing which is also wrong and possibly more wrong!' Many of Hari's defenders pointed out journalistic shortcomings at the Daily Mail or the Sun in his defence; luckily for critics, a logical response to this kind of reasoning was at hand, and from Hari himself, no less.
Frankly baffling was former Guardian editor Peter Preston's piece in today's Observer, which says it's 'ethically ludicrous' for anonymous bloggers to be able to whip up a controversy over Hari's 'occasional habit...of using a cleaned-up, pre-written version of his subject's answers rather than a ... you know ... more um! ... rambling live response.' I refuse to believe that someone with Preston's experience is actually so obtuse as to not realise by this point that a) what Hari's accused of is (once again!) more than removing ums and ahs, b) that his critics are not at all anonymous (he refers to leftist blog DSG, which started the controversy, but conveniently ignores, oh, everyone since), and c) that this charge of ethical ludicrousness makes absolutely no sense at all. Even if Hari's detractors were anonymous, how would that mean that they have no ethical grounds to find fault with Hari?
Strange though these defences are, they actually all have one common theme: the journalists writing them don't seem to believe that we, the readers, really understand. If only we knew what it was like to interview someone. If only we were real journalists and not 'anonymous' bloggers and tweeters. Schuler actually writes that 'anyone who has ever actually conducted interviews or attended discussion will surely smell a rat', while Lawson and Preston use their columns to pour scorn on these riff-raff who use Twitter and blogs to expose wrongdoings.
Despite the fact that comments on earlier articles and debates on Twitter clearly showed that many, many people believed that there was far more to what Hari did than cleaning up quotes, these defences continue to pretend as if that's all it was. Lawson and Preston's articles both make clear what others have merely hinted at: they think we're idiots. We rabble don't understand what an article would look like if we didn't allow quotes to be cleaned up. An exact transcript would be a nightmare! You don't want that! Both ignore the fact that no one has asked for exact transcripts, only an accurate portrayal of an interview that actually took place and not a synopsis of an author's thoughts from elsewhere.
But the Guardian writers insist on telling us what we're angry about, and then telling us that we're wrong to be angry, rather than admitting that there's more to it. To me, this implies that the journalists believe that only they can really set the news agenda. Aside from Hari's actual writings, this story has come entirely from blogs and Twitter. And honestly, there seem to be a lot of mainstream journalists who have a problem with that. I don't believe that the news agenda should be set by 'Twit mobs', as they've been dubbed, which I think I set out pretty clearly on my earlier blog on the Ken Clarke fiasco. But when non-journalists discover a story, and that story is supported by real facts, denial by mainstream press just looks like fear at best and snobbery at worst.
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