Johann Hari: The Indy basically says 'meh'

The Johann Hari saga at the Independent has come to a sort of sputtering, unsatisfying end. Hari's issued an apology in which he repeats his earlier admission that it was wrong of him to take quotes from other sources and pass them off as words said to him in interviews. This time, the admission comes without the attempt at justification which coloured his original apology, and instead with the concession that it was 'arrogant and stupid' of him not to have asked older, more experienced colleagues for their opinion on his unorthodox method. Hari's apology also includes an admission that he did in fact edit Wikipedia articles under the name of David Rose, making his more favourable and adding false, insulting 'facts' to the pages of people with whom he'd argued.

The actions taken to rectify the situation: Hari's returned his Orwell prize, which he admits isn't that big of a deal since rumour has it they were going to strip him of it anyway; he's taken an unpaid leave of absence from the Indy; and he's going to study journalism, to learn all of the things I guess people thought he picked up somewhere but never did. When he returns to writing, his articles will all be footnoted and accompanied by audio recordings of his interviews so people can check his work.

I think Hari's done pretty much everything he can aside from actually resigning from the Indy, which is what I had expected. He's admitted to the things he's been accused of doing wrong, he's acknowledged the way he would be treating someone he didn't like who had done the same things, he's returned his prize, he's gone off to get proper professional training, and he's agreed to a level of disclosure upon his return that is presumably unprecedented for a mainstream journalist. As someone who greatly admired Hari before this all happened, I don't think I'll ever read his stuff again and think of it highly, but I think he's handled this fairly well. Except that I really think he should have just admitted to it all off the bat and resigned, gone to journalism school, and seen if anyone would hire his new, improved self. But I mean, barring that, I guess this is the next best thing.

Unfortunately, the Independent comes out of this affair looking ridiculous, with its credibility in tatters. The Indy currently has no plans to release the report of its investigation in to Hari, saying it's 'private'. This means that any criticisms or revelations about the Indy's editorial practices, ie how this could possibly have been allowed to happen and what will be done in the future to sort that out, who is responsible, etc, are not going to be made public. The Indy's request that the Orwell Prize committee hold off on their announcement (to reportedly strip Hari of the prize) until they were done their investigation just allowed Hari to beat them to it, making the loss of the prize look like his gracious concession instead of a disgrace. The two-month long investigation into facts that were proven by bloggers in the space of a day or two and which one would think were admitted to by Hari pretty early on, just looks sluggish, reactive and desperate to buy time to figure out how to protect Hari and themselves.

I said I assumed Hari would resign - I assumed that he would resign to save both parties from having to say they sacked him, but that they would sack him if he didn't choose to resign. But no. Hari will be welcomed back in 2012 with a watchful eye (well, maybe, who knows since the Indy aren't saying!) and a pat on the head for his journalism degree. Despite admitting to repeatedly breaching two very serious rules (of journalism, of ethics, of basic decency and common sense, take your pick) and destroying the trust readers had in him, Hari will return to a prominent position at the Indy that most young journalists could only dream of; he won't, I imagine, be hired on as a local London news reporter who has to work his way up to the op-ed pages. He'll probably even be able to spin this whole thing and his subsequent foray into j-school (rumoured to be at Columbia) into a good couple of first articles.

In short, a year or so from now, the only people who will really remember will be the people that didn't like Hari in the first place. He'll gain new readers who aren't familiar with his past indiscretions. He'll be without his Orwell prize but will be relieved to have salvaged his job and, let's be honest, his reputation among those in the mainstream media who were never really willing to admit that he did very much wrong in the first place. The Independent has failed miserably in creating real consequences, either for Hari or for itself, and I for one will avoid reading it in the future as a result.

Plagiarism and media denial

So the Johann Hari saga lumbers on. Hari published his apology in the Independent and on his website on Wednesday, in which he denied plagiarism, but admitted that 'in some instances' he used practices that were wrong and which he wouldn't repeat:

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.

Johann Hari - it's not plagiarism, but it's not okay

In a way, it's unfortunate that Johann Hari is the person at the centre of this whole debacle. Not because I like him, though I've expressed admiration for him before, but because he is a high-profile journalist whose opinions tend to be fairly divisive among right and left, conservative and liberal, whatever. So even though the controversy that exploded today raises some legitimate issues about journalistic integrity, much of the discussion consisted of the usual suspects on the right calling for Hari's head (or job, or Orwell Prize) or on the left defending him in a way you know they wouldn't if he weren't on their side.

At any rate, a summary, in case you're not in the UK or haven't used the internet today: On June 17, DSG posted a piece noting glaring similarities between an interview Hari did with Italian communist Antonio Negri in 2004 and a previously published book called Negri on Negri by Anne Dufourmentelle. After reading the post, blogger Brian Whelan yesterday posted his own analysis of Hari's interview with Gideon Levy, and found that, again, large sections of quotes purportedly given during the interview were actually excerpts from Levy's previous writings or lifted from earlier interviews. Hari responded with this, admitting to the practice and defending it in the name of clarity and coherence.

Two of the accusations that have resulted are that Hari is guilty of plagiarism and churnalism. He's correct in saying that he did neither of these things. Plagiarising is passing off someone else's words or work as your own. Hari is using words that have already been said or written by the person he's interviewing, and attributing those words to that person - but not in the right context. And churnalism is the term given to copy where journalists have basically just reproduced a press release - clearly not the case here.

But what Hari is guilty of is journalistic and intellectual dishonesty. He is leading readers to believe that an interviewee said something to him that they did not. His portraits are always intensely personal, and the way the dialogue is laid out suggests that an equally intense conversation took place between the journalist and his subject. The question isn't whether Hari misrepresented the interviewee's ideas (and he and his editor Simon Kelner insist that he hasn't), it's whether he misrepresented the whole interview to his readers. Hari has taken sometimes very poignant and intelligent thoughts and deliberately created the impression that they were said directly to him; he even goes as far as to describe the interviewee's tone or body language while delivering the quote.

Even more disconcerting was Hari's contention that he had called other journalists and asked about this practice, and found it was normal. It doesn't seem that anyone's come forward to confess alongside Hari, but I'm not sure whether this is a sign that he's lying or that people saw the controversy and didn't want their own careers similarly affected. I sincerely hope this is not 'normal practice'. What Hari has essentially admitted to is quoting what he wishes his interviewees had said to him rather than what they actually did. It doesn't matter that they've said the quote before or written the thought in their books and articles. Either you ask the right questions to get the answers you want - and if they're unclear, ask more questions or request clarification - or you attribute the quotes to their original source.

Hari writes, 'My test for journalism is always - would the readers mind if you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently?' He says if someone interviewed him and he was all ums and ahs and you knows, he would prefer that they just quoted his article from the previous week in which he said the same thing more coherently.

But this is disingenuous - it's (actually) normal practice for journalists to remove the ums and ahs from a quote, because this doesn't change the meaning, it just allows for a clearer thought. That's what I would prefer he do - quote a clear answer to the question he asked, not quote what he thinks the person would have liked to have said had they had the time to write down and edit their answers. I do mind what he's done; I admired his interviewing technique, the answers he was able to get out of his subjects, and I now know that some of that is fabricated. At the risk of sounding like his mother, I find the whole thing really disappointing.

I'm curious to see what the outcome of this will be. Rumour has it that Hari will run a piece in tomorrow's Independent (apologising? defending? explaining?), and I think it's unlikely that he'll stop working for them as a result of today's controversy. But the Media Standards Trust has already called for a review into Hari's 2008 Orwell Prize and his reputation has undoubtedly suffered. Will he continue with the same style of interview portraits that have been at the centre of the controversy? Will he be stripped of his Orwell Prize? I think the latter is unlikely - the prize was awarded years ago and so far there are no allegations that any of the work he received the award for is in question. But as to his writing - it's obvious that his next interview will come under very close scrutiny, by his editors and also by those who hope to catch him out.

And perhaps this is what should have been happening all along. Was Hari allowed to get away with this because he is so high-profile, or because of cuts in the industry, which meant that his work has not been subject to very close scrutiny for some time? If you're interested in that, I'd suggest reading this report on Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, which was brought to my attention this weekend, and which touches on editors placing too much trust in reporters. Worth a read!