ProLife.ie - We are an education and awareness organisation committed to the promotion of the culture of life.

British journalism’s wonder boy, Johann Hari, figured in Update 111 (“Scandal of Dirty Hari’s Copy ‘n Paste Interviews”) when it was revealed that he was an habitual plagiarist. His behaviour since then, has become something of a lesson in, err, not repentance, but self-righteous blame-dodging. gtg
 
Before Pope Benedict came to the UK in 2010, he was one of the Pope’s most raucous accusers along with the Andrew Dawkins gang. A self-avowed atheist and progressive, he was lionised by the London media after he wrote in 2000 about his experiences of the drug ecstasy while at Cambridge University. It now appears that he has never touched the drug but appropriated a friend’s account.  At the tender age of 22, he soon had a job with London’s Independent daily, and made a name for himself as a leading investigative journalist. 
 
The Independent newspaper was founded in 1986 by Andreas Whittam Smith to be a paper of moral rectitude. He is numbered among Britain’s “great and good”, and as first editor proclaimed on the front page that the Independent was not connected with any political party and reported the news “without bias”. Some claim! In fact, the paper has a definite liberal-left set, and—no surprise!—supports the Lib Dems.
 
Hari’s reaction to the first allegations in July 2011 was a denial of any fault, moral or journalistic. Since then, as revelations tumbled out in a steady flow, his admissions took the form of a series of grudging apologies followed by self-justification and blame. 
 
He became renowned for his interviews with celebrities. But, undetected until last June, much of the material attributed to the interviewee was lifted from previous interviews or books, and presented as original. This was, Hari innocently claimed, just making clearer what the interviewee either should have said, or had once said. Until found out, this made Hari seem like a top-ranking journalist, and a major attraction for the readers of the Independent.
 
In 2008 he won the Orwell Prize, a plaque and £2000. In September, Hari announced that he was returning the plaque (but not the money), even though he stood by the prize-winning article on an atrocity in the Central African Republic. The Orwell Prize committee had already decided to cancel the award in the light of revelations of Hari’s sub-standard reporting.
 
Exercise of Malice and Dishonesty
 
Another of Hari’s “stupidities” was the use of a “sock-puppet”, a fictional writer named David Rose who posed as Hari’s defender. Using Wikipedia, a popular Internet site, he wrote abusive and malicious pieces about his critics, while praising his own work to the skies. Wikipedia allows people to insert written material anonymously, and Hari used this to wage a nasty campaign against his critics and ideological enemies. This activity had been routine for years, and one target of his venom was Christina Odone, whom he accused of homophobia, anti-semitism and having been sacked by the Catholic Herald, all of which were untrue but damaging smears.
 
On September 15, Hari published a kind of apology in the Independent, acknowledging “two wrong and stupid things” but went on to blame “the powerful people I had taken on over the years”. This failed to satisfy his peers in the media. For instance, the secular and leftwing David Allen Green in the New Statesman wrote: “the terms of the apology do not really approximate to what was actually done. Something very wrong happened, over a significant amount of time, involving a systemic exercise of malice and dishonesty”. As for bosses of the Independent, after castigating other papers for secrecy and evasion, especially over the hacking scandal, the decision to “re-cycle” Hari instead of sacking him and to keep Whittam Smith’s internal investigation under wraps suggest a less than exacting search for truth and more of a whitewash.
 
The contrast with America is striking. Back in 2003, when Jayson Blair got fired from the New York Times for fabricating stories of foreign events in his apartment, and pretending to have had face to face encounters with real people, the NYT’s  editor wrote a long piece lamenting “a profound betrayal of trust…. and deception”. In Hari’s case, he wasn’t sacked and the newspaper’s chiefs just tut-tutted in a short note in September last year, and put him on gardener’s leave.
 
Hari has promised to take unpaid absence from his job until 2012, and to follow a course in journalism. This proposal has caused cynical hilarity. Without doubt, Hari is an accomplished journalist; what he lacks is moral integrity. He needs to follow a course of ethics, or, better still, go to confession.