“And what of the grotesque insult to the dignity of Hari’s Wikipedia victims, after his pseudonymous accusations were seen by none?”

Not sure how you know that no-one saw the slanders posted. I imagine quite a few did.

‘And what of the grotesque insult to the dignity of Hari’s Wikipedia victims, after his pseudonymous accusations were seen by none?’

A quote from Christina Odone:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100096260/i-fell-out-with-johann-hari-%E2%80%93-then-david-rose-started-tampering-viciously-with-my-wikipedia-entry/

‘I thought no more about it – until a “friend” of my mother’s teased her about my Wikipedia entry. “Your daughter’s not exactly a shining beacon of professional integrity,” summed up her reaction. She read out the nastier bits of my potted (and manipulated) bio, and my mother was devastated’.

As you’ve demonstrated repeatedly on other blogs, Rodent, your commitment to accuracy compared to invective is somewhat wanting.

Flying rodent;

Are you hari (or david rose) in disguise?

What other journalists or newspapers have done does not for a moment excuse what hari has done.

He was doing a good job at getting up brownshirt tories noses. That is why they spent so much effort to bring him down. Not one of the people he interviewed complaines. OH well at least he did not print the Hitler diaries.

Quite right. Let’s all make light of Johann Hari’s lies, slanders and multiple deceptions: after all, he is one of us.

Indeed he is – and the reaction of many on the left speaks volumes about the hypocrisy and pea-brained partisanship that passes for integrity here.

@ Sally

The first people to expose Hari’s misconduct belonged to a website called the ‘Deterritorial Support Group’. I think you’ll find that they’re not exactly ‘brownshirt Tories’, to put it quite mildly.

Hari is a British Jayson Blair. End of story.

What other journalists or newspapers have done does not for a moment excuse what hari has done.

Did somebody say it did? I certainly didn’t.

Screw Johann Hari – “ripping off quotes” is a sacking offence, “Wikitampering” a fingerwagging and “Being a pompous, self-aggrandising little arse” merits a horsewhipping, in my opinion.

He should certainly have been fired. Now that he hasn’t, he’s going to get the vicious beatdown every time he opens his mouth, and his detractors will still be boo-hooing over this for years to come.

Let’s at least try to tweeze whatever amusement we can out of this po-faced and hilariously overblown row, rather than sitting around intoning meaningless platitudes about some great and non-existent insult to British journalism’s long-since crap-splattered reputation.

She read out the nastier bits of my potted (and manipulated) bio, and my mother was devastated’.

Oh no! Say it isn’t so!

Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t care whether Christina Odone was mildly inconvenienced by a tampered Wikipedia page, and anyone – other than Christina herself, or her nearest and dearest – who is even slightly upset by it is surely suffering from a ridiculous failure in their sense of proportion.

Get a grip, folks.

British right wing media are like the school yard bully, they can dish it out, but they cant take it. As usual they have a hissy fit and clutch their pearls.

I’ve always thought that Johann Hari’s apparent inability to get his facts right in his columns ought to be considered at least as damning as his propensity to steal or make-up quotes from interviewees. That he’s also a malicious little sockpuppet doesn’t really alter my opinion of him.

5

5 Yes you hate this site so much you keep coming here. Moronic little troll.

Sally, most of the actual running on this has been done by Guy Walters and Brian Whelan – neither of whom are right-wing in the slightest. There’s a reason that journalists are on the whole cross about the Hari saga – it makes them all look so bad. Try Bagehot in the Economist for that perspective:

once you start making things up a bit, you might as well start making it all up and file without even getting on a plane. And then you quickly feel the ground vanishing beneath your feet: if you are inventing things, why be a journalist at all?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/09/unethical-journalism

9 but nobody on here is remotely interseted in your tory talking points troll. As you demonstrated the other day with your defence of tory politicians drug taking, and lying integrity is not your strong point. When the the brownshirt tory trolls lecrure on integrity and honesty you know they have jumped the shark.

And I don’t think Tim J is a troll, either.

This whole article is one over-drawn out forced joke, posited on the obviously false basis that the anger about Hari is broadly and simply the anger of fellow (and equally hypocritical) journalists. It is faulty to present this as some newspaper industry internal spat. It is misleading in three important ways:

1. Most of the attacking and exposure of Hari has been done not by journalists – indeed he has been defended by a surprisingly large number of his fellow journalists – but rather by bloggers and readers – so much so that the Independent no longer allows comments on Har’s articles, so widespread is the revuslion of readers at his dishonesty.

2. Hari was no ordinary jounrlaist. He’s probably the most decorated journalist in Britain in the past decade – i.e. during the totality of his career. It now transpires he’s going for training to learn about, er, how to be journalist. That such an inept and lying creep was the golden boy of British journalism is a rather damning reflection on the profession of journalist.

3. There are bad journalists, and then there are bad journalists, and yet Hari was in a league of his own in terms of the amount of plagiarism exposed. None of what he has written can now be taken at face value, such is his proven proclivity for making things up. He is in the Jason Blair and Chalres Glass league, and the Indie has really made itself a hostage to fortune from now on by keeping on such a liar.

That is why the case still matters.

Oh please spare me the crocodile tears of modern newspaper journalists.THese are the poor little darlings who take a pay check from Murdoch, or the Mail, or the torygraph. Their credibility ship sailed years ago.

13 – You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I actually broadly agree with FR here. Although I think a slight change to this analogy is called for:

a proposition akin to a career poledancer launching a crusade for public modesty

I’d see it more like career poledancers furious at a fellow poledancer who has been getting extra tips by giving clients blowjobs out back. It drops beneath even the pretty low ethical standards of the job, and it makes the punters think that’ what all poledancers do.

@sally

You’re a joke right?

‘Sally’ must be Johann’s latest creation. Who else could summon up the enthusiasm to defend him so energetically?

Also, the technique of trying to turn it into a left-v-right thing, so as to force lefties into his camp, is one of his ploys.

[19] She could just fancy him. There’s no law against it…

7. flyingrodent

Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t care whether Christina Odone was mildly inconvenienced by a tampered Wikipedia page, and anyone – other than Christina herself, or her nearest and dearest – who is even slightly upset by it is surely suffering from a ridiculous failure in their sense of proportion.

I don’t think being called an Anti-Semite or a drunk is a mild inconvenience. I hope that Ms. Odone seeks legal advice and sues for libel. As she would if the Indie had printed such claims – and Wikipedia has a vastly greater readership than the Indie.

So you don’t care. I am not sure the Courts will agree with you. I hope not.

What I did find hilarious about the original accusations way back when was the usual queue of right wing “journalists” (in quotes because I’m mainly talking about Telegraph “bloggers”) were making such a massive deal out of it when lets face it, the vast majority of people in this country have no idea who Hari even is. It’s pretty irrelevant. Then came the phone hacking incident, which the same people said was “media bubble nonsense”. Look how that all turned out. Some people are hilariously deluded. In the grand scheme of things it’s a media bubble war over nothing (Hari shouldn’t have a job at this point though), and in that sense the OP is completely right. Still, better for the fruitcakes to be spending all their time on Hari I suppose than their usual rants.

Follow the tweets:-

15 Sep »
indy_hack indy hack
@ @Sallyoo it stinks

15 Sep Sallyoo Chloe Phelps (alias)
@ @indy_hack Welcome to the real world.

15 Sep » indy_hack indy hack
General mood livid over hari situation. Mainly at double standards. One rule for bosses/favoured few, another for those churning out paper

15 Sep »
indy_hack indy hack
If any ordinary member of staff at the Indy had done the same as johann hari would they still be in a job?

14 Sep »
indy_hack indy hack
johann hari off to states to learn about ethics. paying out of his own pocket, management keen to stress

http://twitter.com/#!/Sallyoo
http://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=indy_hack

@ Flying Rodent.

So spreading lies about someone and smearing them as a bigot doesn’t matter, does it? That’s nice to know.

@ ‘sally’

Johann, this is exactly the kind of behaviour that got you into trouble. You’ll never learn, will you?

I’d see it more like career poledancers furious at a fellow poledancer who has been getting extra tips by giving clients blowjobs out back. It drops beneath even the pretty low ethical standards of the job, and it makes the punters think that’ what all poledancers do.

I find it hard to believe that anyone who works on the same paper as Con Coughlin – lookinatchoo Damian Thompson/Toby Young – is shocked by lapses of professional ethics. That’s not to say I don’t think Hari’s done enough to be sacked, rehired and sacked all over again.

I’ve no sympathy with him over the inventing quotes thing. i never really rated him as a journo, though i equally could never understand why people hated him so much.

But the wikitampering stuff is of no interest at all and anyone getting upset over it is protesting too much. for example ‘Nick Cohen’s excellent diary piece’ is nothing like that – it’s just the other side of the coin, as Nick Cohen is himself an enthusiastic ‘editor’ of his own wiki site.

And noting that Nick Cohen likes a drink is hardly defamatory – see the videos of Cohen’s booze-fuelled rantings at the Orwell Prize a couple fo years ago, as well as a couple of Private Eye pieces, for evidence that this is hardly invention, even if it’s not very nice to put it on a wiki page.

It’s also worth noting that Cohen’s book What’s Left is primarily based on the work of others (as cursory ‘fact’-checking reveals), and this is more often than not unacknowledged.

That’s before we get to Harry’s Place and its regulars crowing over this – as if they’d never been guilty of obsessively trying to derail careers, re-edit wikipedia, and character assassination.

Hari’s piece says that he ignored the basic rule – don’t do stuff to people that you wouldn’t want done to yourself – and fair enough, he’s right. It’s a shame, then, that the people jumping up and down with glee over this are so often guilty of the exact same obsessiveness, wikitampering, factual inaccuracy and unacknowledged use of sources that Hari is. And that’s Rodent’s point.

And noting that Nick Cohen likes a drink is hardly defamatory

Calling Cristina Odone an anti-semitic homophobe is though.

You can be sure had Hari gone after Sunny’s Wikipedia page and called him an anti-semite etc, that this site’s line would not be “yeah the copying quotes was bad, but the Wikipedia trolling was of no consequence”

i was trying to find the odone stuff on wiki but i find it impossible to follow. if anyone could find the text I’d be much obliged – odone’s own link just goes through to Nick Cohen who doesn’t offer the text itself.

I don’t give a hoot about Hari, though if he’s doing something else rather than ranting away in the newspaper, or on the television, on the basis of stuff that he’s made up, then life will be a little more pleasant.

I do give a hoot about:

A newspaper that stands behind articles which have already been shown to be partly or wholly false, and which refuses to take responsibility for material it has published, and which declares that investigations into published material are ‘private’. That last will leak, though.

A newpaper which doesn’t seem to care about developing it’s employees into competent journalists.

A journalist who apologises to his colleagues and his readers, but doesn’t say a word about the people – some of whom are activists in risky situations – into who’s mouths he’s put sensationalised words.

There’s also a question for Wikipedia about notability of sources – drivel in ‘published sources’ is acceptable, while accurate material from other source is not.

How to square that circle?

And I wonder whether Sunny is going to get as excited about the real ‘antisemite’ slur on Odone, as he did about the alleged one on Evan Harris last week?

Mrs. For Subtlety – I don’t think being called an Anti-Semite or a drunk is a mild inconvenience.

It depends, doesn’t it? I mean, being called an anti-semite on a high profile TV show or in a well-read newspaper is one thing. An aggressive hate campaign aimed at the same result by a gaggle of bloggers is another, and a Wikipedia edit that is swiftly edited is another again. Let’s just observe right now that, if that shit is actionable in court, then there are several thousand bloggers who need to invest in brown underwear as a matter of urgency.

I hope that Ms. Odone seeks legal advice and sues for libel.

As I said in the post, I agree with this. Libel law isn’t my forte, but it’s my understanding that reputional damage is the central issue. Given that none of us would’ve heard of this had Nick C. not made such a big deal of it, I’m going to go right ahead and assume that a judge would award a nominal fee – a pound, say – and leave the interested parties to pay their giant, fuck-off legal bills. Result all round, I reckon.

On the other hand, I have to reiterate the point that anyone other than the concerned parties who claims to be mildly annoyed by some shitty Wikipedia edits to someone else’s profile, no doubt swiftly removed, is either a) bullshitting right in our faces or b) tapped in the head.

Spankcloth and Bashes – So spreading lies about someone and smearing them as a bigot doesn’t matter, does it? That’s nice to know.

(Cough)Tit(Cough)

@15

Lamia

Charles Glass is an American journalist of – so far as I’m aware – unquestioned integrity. He certainly displayed great moral and physical courage when held as a hostage by Hezbollah types in Lebanon.

I think you must mean Stephen Glass.

just as a note, I don’t actually believe that anyone feigning horror at any of this actually buys, and reads, the indie. Whenever I come across a copy I’m amazed that anyone would buy it – the writing is just so bad. When it’s not Hari it’s Howard ‘interminably dull and unfunny’ Jacobson, or Tracey Emin. That says everything you need to know about quality control right there.

Ms Odone might sue. That is priceless. She has written for Murdoch and The Catholic Herald. That guarantees she has no cridibilty. No, the clutching of pearls by the tory brownshirts shows that he was hitting home. Which is why there has been such a hissy fit by the brownshirts.

When right wing tub thumpers have to hide behind so called integrity, you see how riddiculous these people are.

I remember the days when cheeky scamps would mod Tony Blair’s wiki page with often malicious falsehoods. It was all regarded then as a bit of a laugh, how the times of innocence have

Sally;

Do you even know who ‘brownshirts’ refers to?

Comment #22 is spot on, apart from one point.

The decision of whether Hari has a job is the Indy’s. And it is probably the right commercial decision to make from their perspective.

Students of Sallyana might be interested to know that’s the 6,792nd time she’s word the word “brownshirts” on LibCon.

We are talking about the same Christina Odone who called Dr Evan Harris ‘Dr Death’ just because he supports the science in abortion, yes?

Perhaps Johann Hari’s mistake was to use Wikipedia to call these people names instead of just his columns.

[deleted]

@ Flying Rodent.

Yet again, you show the same level of intellectual competence as you’ve displayed on HP and Shiraz Socialist.

@ ‘sally’

Brownshirt, brownshirt, brownshirt. Change the record already, or tell us all why plagiarised interviews, the invention of quotes, fabricated stories (Carlo Giuliani, Dubai, the CAR) and the lifting of the ‘Der Spiegel’ piece don’t matter, just so long as the journalist has the ‘right’ sort of politics.

@Sunny – I probably should have added “in my opinion” there. Agreed with you about it being the Indie’s decision regarding his job.

First we have commentors describing Natalie Rowe as a “whore” using the word in a distinctly pejorative manner, then we have poledancers described as having “pretty low ethical standards”…

wtf is it with some of the people here? Why the shitty comments about women bringing home the bacon? Are you not getting any or something?

I suppose though, that would offer a Reichian explanation for some of the vituperative comments both here on Lib Con, and on other political blogs.

[deleted]

@28

Insertion in Wiki here – 28/8/2006:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cristina_Odone&diff=prev&oldid=72293102

Deletion here – 1/9/2006:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cristina_Odone&diff=next&oldid=73210841

One version of the article including it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cristina_Odone&oldid=73210841

Page view stats don’t go back that far – only to Dec 2006, but would suggest maybe up to 100-200 views unless something drove traffic, plus offsite copies (prob. not sigificant).

Just looking up all our tory trolls outrage about some of the shit put out by Staines and Darce.

May take some time. Like a million years.

Why was my post taken down?

You will never appese tory trolls.

I’d see it more like career poledancers furious at a fellow poledancer who has been getting extra tips by giving clients blowjobs out back. It drops beneath even the pretty low ethical standards of the job, and it makes the punters think that’ what all poledancers do.

Nothing unethical about pole-dancing, unless you think implants are the equivalence of lying.

What Hari did was the equivalent of wearing false tits while tucking his tackle between his legs like that guy in Silence of the Lambs in order to con short-sighted punters.

Calling Cristina Odone an anti-semitic homophobe is though.

She’s a practicing Catholic. Therefore, she’s definitionally a homophobe. End of story. Like Organic Cheesboard, I’ve been unable to track down any reference to ‘antisemitic’ outside of context-free accusations; anyone got anything?

doesn’t say a word about the people – some of whom are activists in risky situations – into who’s mouths he’s put sensationalised words.

That’s because he doesn’t accept that he’s done this (he’s coughed up to the using-quotes-from-books-and-other-articles and the Wiki sockpuppeting). It’s a bit much to expect someone to apologise for something they didn’t actually do.

Overlap there – thanks Matt for the link. Has Jackie Ashley accused Odone of antisemitism, just out of interest?

yes – just to reiterate – what’s the text behind the claims about Odone?

all links lead back to Cohen, but his source seems to be, er, Odone herself – fair enough, but there is surely a (ahem) paper trail here? It can’t be that hard to find for seasoned wiki users…?

“once you start making things up a bit, you might as well start making it all up and file without even getting on a plane. And then you quickly feel the ground vanishing beneath your feet: if you are inventing things, why be a journalist at all?”

That is genuinely amusing. Most journalists are simply hacks paid to do their proprietor’s bidding. The press is rife with invention and misinformation designed specifically for this purpose.

The saddest thing about this whole episode is that Hari is a genuinely brilliant writer who didn’t need to resort to such ruses (I say that as one who has crossed swords with him in the past), which has allowed the right a field-day of self-congratulation, and given free-reign to the indignation of frustrated leftist journalists in the blogosphere.

One wonders whether a right-of-centre journalist would have been force-fed so much humble-pie if they’d been found to have sexed-up an interview?

43 & 47 – ethics clearly not the right word (I’m a Kent man, myself).

I feel shaky and my brow is damp; perhaps I’ve eaten something slightly off, or need a bit of a break; but I think … I might just … agree with Flying Rodent. Nurse! Nurse!

Jackie Ashley I don’t know. JH it would probably be on one of the articles he’s deleted from his website, if so, or in an unguarded comment somewhere at a single cause bash in a flight of rhetoric.

Intriguing prospect – JH accuses JA of having accused CO of being antisemitic.

‘The saddest thing about this whole episode is that Hari is a genuinely brilliant writer who didn’t need to resort to such ruses’

Yeah, I mean he could just have made a career for himself writing gay incest porn.

[48] What Hari did was the equivalent of wearing false tits while tucking his tackle between his legs like that guy in Silence of the Lambs in order to con short-sighted punters – JH’s deception may be even worse than I first thought?
http://www.dvdactive.com/misc/chris/hdcaps/tsotl/silenceofthelambsbdcap5.jpg

The measure of an individual is how they treat their enemies, not their friends.

52 Charles is bang on the money. If you take the Murdoch shilling, you sing the Murdoch tune.
There is no interity in the right wing media.

@ Sally

You’re a one-trick pony, and that trick is no longer entertaining.

Hari is in trouble because he nicked other people’s copy, took chunks of text from his subjects own writings and passed them off as the products of his interviews, and embellished (and possibly even fabricated) his reports from abroad. He is not in trouble because of some sinister rightwing/brownshirt/Tory media plot.

You’re either a sockpuppet, or you’re one of his groupies. Either way, your failure to get to grips with this story is a bit embarrassing for you.

@51. organic cheeseboard

Odone says that the original publication was on JH’s own site, and removed after she threatened legal action.

>… accused me of being an anti-Semitic bully on his website (and took it down after I wrote to him threatening legal action)…

The only audit trail would be Goog cache if it was a whole article deleted (need full url though) and archive.org, which respects the robots.txt on johanhari.com, and therefore won’t display anything for the site.

Iam not here to entertain, just call out hyocritical tory scum like you. Go back to staines sewer. That is the integrity you like.

@ Sally

You need to seek medical help, because you’re not so much barking as completely Upminster.

Still, at least you’ve now figured out how to spell ‘integrity’.

“The decision of whether Hari has a job is the Indy’s. And it is probably the right commercial decision to make from their perspective.”

I am not so sure. The Indie has now exposed itself to charges of hypocrisy whenever it tries to attack dishonesty in anyone else in future. By keeping Hari on, it has insulted its readers’ intelligence and embarassed its more honest journalists. It’s reduced itself to the level of the tabloids it looks down upon. That hardly makes sense as a commercial decision, even leaving aside the issue of integrity (which, it appears, is not to be considered of any importance for some on the liberal left when ‘it’s one of ours’).

As for Hari, why should anyone ever again believe a word he ever writes, when so much of what he has written has been shown to be falsehood? The fact is, the liberal left has plenty of decent journalists who can make its cases, and Hari can only harm them by continued association.

Many journalists seem to get this, and understand that this is not a politcally partisan matter but one that reflects on the integrity of their own profession, hence the anger on places like the press gazette. Those finding it ‘hilarious’ that the Telegraph and co are going after Hari are closing their eyes to the fact that Hari being retained damages the whole journalism profession and makes it more likely that other journalists will gamble on following his behaviour, because the ‘penalty’ is so paltry. How on earth that is supposed to good for the health of the media in our country is anyone’s idea.

There are plenty of hardworking, honest and conscientious journalists out there. I would like those trying to pass this off as merely a matter of a rightwing grudge against the left to explain what sort of message they think the Indie’s decision sends out to honest journalists. To me – and evidently to a number of journalists commenting – it looks like: “Don’t bother, you stupid suckers.”

Those finding it ‘hilarious’ that the Telegraph and co are going after Hari are closing their eyes to the fact that Hari being retained damages the whole journalism profession…

I think this is a hilarious notion on a grand scale, like suggesting that Dunfermline Athletic somehow paying a million quid for a player makes the whole game of football “about money”.

Thank you.

This out of control selective outrage is now only embarrassing itself. Between the hysterical sight of Damian ‘non-objective much’ Thomson hyper-ventillating as he runs round trying to shore up support on twitter and god knows where else, to the still persistent calls for Hari to be strung up — one phrase comes to mind:

Get a grip. Today the Met — remember them, the corrupt cess gallivanting around country clubs at the behest of Murdoch and co — issued a court order to the Guardian demanding they reveal their sources for the very stories that exposed their rot.

Bigger things to worry about folks. Leave Hari be.

Someone’s pointed out offline that my comment about Odone above is unfair. Not on her – bollocks to her – but on ordinary people who happen to be Catholic.

“A part of the Catholic establishment who regularly writes print pieces publicly supporting and defending the Church’s positions”, would have been a fairer point.

My original statement encompasses Tom Cobbleigh/anyone else who’s born into the faith and hasn’t taken the (obviously) momentous and heartbreaking step of leaving it, which wasn’t reasonable of me.

So two wrongs make a shrug, basically, and the fact that Hari is the most deocrated journalist of the past decade is neither here nor there for some.

It is quite possible for the profession to be damged by more than one instance. And it is only Hari, not the disgusting News Corp, who is finding defenders reduced to ‘arguing’ that the Indie has done the right thing… well, commercially.

Who’s defending Hari? Fuck Hari. What do I have to do, email you all jpegs of me wiping my backside on a photo of the geezer?

To be clear. My point here is that a) More or less everyone involved in this scenario is a bullshitter, a hack, a serial liar or all three and that b) I’m very hopeful that all of them remain pissed off and angry, so that they make even bigger jackasses of themselves by continuing to say make silly, ridiculously overblown pronouncements along the lines of “Hari being retained damages the whole journalism profession…”

“My point here is that a) More or less everyone involved in this scenario is a bullshitter, a hack, a serial liar or all three…”

Yes, I got that, and I pointed out that it wasn’t true. You are treating this as if it is only the likes of Thompson and Odone making hay. In fact most of the running in the story was done by leftish bloggers – not journalists – and that non-famous journalists of all kinds, see e.g. comments in Press Gazette – are angry about what Hari has done.

You have no way of knowing or howing that those people are in significant or large part ‘serial liars’ or ‘hacks’, and thus bullshitters, you are just making baseless, unsubstantiated and arrogant assumptions about the character and motivations of everyone who differs from you on this matter. This makes you article and your follow up posts here merely an otherwise pointless exercise in narcissistic nihilism, and, as such, of value only to your own evidently fragile and insecure ego. Well done.

69. Exactly. Hari real crime is he gave a few right wing arse wipes a good kicking. That is the real reason for the fake outrage. All the integrity nonsense is a smoke screen.

you are just making baseless, unsubstantiated and arrogant assumptions about the character and motivations of everyone who differs from you on this matter.

If you think that’s bad, you should click on the “Other posts by this author” link.

Funny though, today, The Wail has this today.

Maybe Mr Hari isn’t all that unusual anymore, and this is just something that will become ever more common among many photographers and journalists, now that it has been made so easy by modern technology. It only takes seconds to cut and paste a few words from one document to another.

It seems to me that the discussion about Mr Hari might be missing the point, and that this kind of thing might be more common than many think.

There have been some recent surveys of student’s attitudes to plagiarism. Many appeared unable to understand the concepts clearly and had difficulty understanding things such as referencing.

Technologies create new ethics and understandings of right and wrong – look at the filesharing debate for an example of this.

@ Matt Wardman – cheers – but for me, that’s a pretty flimsy basis on which to sue now. The Wiki thing said ‘citation needed’ which means that anyone reading it would have known it was at least dodgy; and if the posts were on his website, and she saw them and threatened to sue, then I’m not sure what this particular case would add to the last one. There will be evidence of the posts somewhere I’m sure, but the case seems oddly tangential to the main issues here, such as they are.

In fact it reeks, as Cohen’s post did, of opportunistically opening up an old feud.

Sally:
“Exactly. Hari real crime is he gave a few right wing arse wipes a good kicking. That is the real reason for the fake outrage. All the integrity nonsense is a smoke screen.”

Also the fact that he is highly, highly annoying.

Has anyone scoped out David Rose’s wiki edits? They really are something else:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Johann_Hari/Archive_2

There’s no way he can survive after the trawling done by wingnuts on this. I just trawled briefly through his 2006 edit arguments (of himself) and the guy really is way out there.

The decision of whether Hari has a job is the Indy’s. And it is probably the right commercial decision to make from their perspective.

Really? I didn’t know the Independent is deliberately moving into fiction.

I can’t get that angry about the Hari affair. To be sure he has been a silly boy, and his practice of slipping in bits from already existing interviews and articles is definitely reprehensible, but once again I ask this question that his detractors have not answered: did he distort the views of those whom he dishonestly quoted?

Compared to his misdemeanours, how about journalists who have been caught openly distorting what people have said? The Guardian has been rumbled on this, see here and here and here.

And what about the hacks who regularly distort and ‘interpret’ government figures about, say, people on Incapacity Benefit to make claimants look like scroungers, or those who blithely retail government lies? The infamous ’45 minutes’ just before the Iraq war comes to mind.

Compared to these, Hari’s wrong-doings are fairly minor.

Is the hoo-ha about Hari more about the fact that he changed his mind on the Iraq war, and the ‘Decents’ can’t forgive him for this?

.

The measure of an individual is how they treat their enemies, not their friends.

I’m not sure where you came up with this, but it’s rubbish.

The mark of a society is how it treats its weakest…

Personally, I’d like my enemies thoroughly crushed and my friends enjoying life. But that’s just me. Feel free to analyse that.

Really? I didn’t know the Independent is deliberately moving into fiction.

They’d only be joining most of Fleet Street if they did.

Is the hoo-ha about Hari more about the fact that he changed his mind on the Iraq war, and the ‘Decents’ can’t forgive him for this?

Actually it’s worse than that. Most of those who opposed the war can’t forgive him either. Independence of thought is always unsettling, even if momentary.

What is most enjoyable though is the way in which the mere mention of Hari’s name can evoke a bubbling outbreak of rage among the chattering classes. it’s like throwing a piece of soap in one of those Icelandic geysers and then standing back, the disproportionate violence of the reaction is half the fun.

Hari’s journalistic ‘crimes’ don’t seem particularly dreadful to me as a non-journalist. At worst his quoting unattributed sources is lazy and unfair if other writers were involved, but I suspect most interview subjects would be delighted to have their considered thoughts repeated rather than whatever disconnected ramblings they actually came out with.

But any journalist rewriting (or not) a press release is doing the same thing. Placing unsourced accusations on a Wikipedia biog is not very nice, but it didn’t remain there long and certainly no one rational would take such a thing seriously. Any wasn’t he technically libelling Jackie Ashley and … er… himself by saying they had written such things?

And no one seems to have noticed the delicious irony that he had to return to prize named after the sainted Orwell for doing the same thing that Orwell was accused of doing in, say, the Road to Wigan Pier – embroidering the facts to make them more dramatic. (But only poor people complained so it didn’t matter).

I suspect Hari is a rather annoying person in real life and he would appear to be shockingly immature if it weren’t for the fact that most of those attacking him are doing a good impersonation of a toddler throwing its toys out of its pushchair.

That immaturity can’t explain the malevolence towards him however. Envy at his success and a feeling he is not really one of the ‘gang’ (not quite British enough, a bit too gay) must be a part of it. But I suspect there’s something else too.

British journalism hasn’t exactly been covering itself in glory recently, both in what it did do and in what it didn’t report. By tying the sins of the community onto this convenient scapegoat, they can drive it out into the wilderness (well Harvard), feel terribly good about themselves and then go on in the same old corrupt ways doing the will of their masters and ignoring whatever news is inconvenient.

Still we can continue to take a sardonic pleasure at the communal denunciations and implications of journalistic self-virtue.

In one of the more rational contributions above, Carolyn at #66, pointed out a real scandal about the Press, an attempt to obtain journalistically privileged information from the Guardian. Once all the Press and the chattering classes would have gathered round to defend the paper – an attack on one would be seen as an attack on all. Now it will be about whether you are ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Guardian and any consideration of press freedom will be ignored in cheering or sneering depending on which side you are on.

Still they can always cheer themselves up by picking on someone else.

31. flyingrodent

It depends, doesn’t it?

Not really.

I mean, being called an anti-semite on a high profile TV show or in a well-read newspaper is one thing. An aggressive hate campaign aimed at the same result by a gaggle of bloggers is another, and a Wikipedia edit that is swiftly edited is another again. Let’s just observe right now that, if that shit is actionable in court, then there are several thousand bloggers who need to invest in brown underwear as a matter of urgency.

Well good. Bloggers should be more careful. Swiftly edited? Do you have evidence of that? The readership of Wikipedia is vastly greater than that of most high profile TV shows and I bet it is higher than any British paper now the NotW is gone. Hari defamed her by any sensible reading. That the Indie should be standing behind him is bizarre.

Libel law isn’t my forte, but it’s my understanding that reputional damage is the central issue. Given that none of us would’ve heard of this had Nick C. not made such a big deal of it, I’m going to go right ahead and assume that a judge would award a nominal fee – a pound, say – and leave the interested parties to pay their giant, fuck-off legal bills. Result all round, I reckon.

You might assume that but given they have awarded stupid damages for much less – for books not even published in the UK – I wonder. We will see. Wikipedia is now the first and main source of information for most people. As a source of reputational damage it is pretty serious. But let’s see what Ms. Odone does.

On the other hand, I have to reiterate the point that anyone other than the concerned parties who claims to be mildly annoyed by some shitty Wikipedia edits to someone else’s profile, no doubt swiftly removed, is either a) bullshitting right in our faces or b) tapped in the head.

The edits in themselves are meaningless. That Hari behaved in what is a very petulant and childish manner – through fraud as well – is not. It is a serious offense for a journalist.

[79]

Personally, I’d like my enemies thoroughly crushed and my friends enjoying life. But that’s just me. Feel free to analyse that.

It’s what the rest of us expect of Sikhs (and indeed why we like them). But it wouldn’t do if we were all the same…

Well if you look at the references helpfully provided by Matt Wardmann at #45, as far as I can tell the offending wording:

“Her former colleagues Jackie Ashley and Johann Hari have accused her of anti-Semitism and homophobia”

was added by Hari at 00:58 on 28/8/06. This was flagged up as unsourced at 08:07 on 29/8/06 and then completely removed at 12:03 on 1/9/06.

So it was up for four and a half days, for a good three of which it flagged as being dodgy.

During which time the entry was edited by a certain Edward Lucas (23:03 on 29/8), who apparently saw nothing wrong with the above sentence.

I’m not a Wikipedia expert, so I may have misunderstood these details and stand to be corrected. But at least I tried to do some research. But then I’m not a journalist.

@79 Sunny

Personally, I’d like my enemies thoroughly crushed and my friends enjoying life. But that’s just me.

Not just you, Sunny.

Me too. But we’re not Christians, are we?

As I understand it, Christians are enjoined to love their enemies. And by extension, Christian societies or civilizations with an over-arching Christian ethos or ethical framework are likely to make that requirement socially normative to some extent.

I’m happy to live in such a society, even if I find the ground rules a bit quirky.

I’m not sure I’m up to living up to such a high moral demand. And to me it makes little sense – at first blush.

But hey – maybe the world would be better if people did treat their enemies better?

@ 81:

“but I suspect most interview subjects would be delighted to have their considered thoughts repeated rather than whatever disconnected ramblings they actually came out with.”

The purpose of an interview isn’t to make the interviewee feel good about themselves; it’s to provide a record of a particular meeting between two people. By making it look like his quotations were actually spoken to him in an interview, Hari is lying — not just about his subjects, but also about his own skills as an interviewer (by making it look like he can get all these great quotations when really he can’t).

It also makes it harder to trust anything else he writes. By passing this stuff off as actual interview material, Hari’s made it clear that he has a rather… flexible approach to the truth. Knowing this, would you really trust what else he says? I remember reading an article a while back about the US political situation, which featured some Tea Party members going around shouting “Obama’s a Muslim!” Now, maybe he *did* actually to meet some real people who happened to conform to the middle-class liberal-left stereotype of the Tea Party, but frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just made it up. I suspect lots of people will think the same.

“But any journalist rewriting (or not) a press release is doing the same thing.”

“But he was doing it too!” is the sort of argument you’d expect a ten-year-old to use, not one of Britain’s most prestigious journalists.

“And no one seems to have noticed the delicious irony that he had to return to prize named after the sainted Orwell for doing the same thing that Orwell was accused of doing in, say, the Road to Wigan Pier – embroidering the facts to make them more dramatic.”

And it was wrong when Orwell did it. Also, see above point about arguments and ten-year-olds.

@ 79:

“Personally, I’d like my enemies thoroughly crushed and my friends enjoying life. But that’s just me. Feel free to analyse that.”

It suggests that you’re a rather vindictive person who has difficulty empathising with people he doesn’t like.

A month or so back I went and read through his archive at the Indy…..what I could see of it at least.

On the bits that I do know about, the bits that I would know where to check, he simply managed to get near every single fact wrong. No, I don’t mean about Keynesian economics effectiveness or matters of opinion like that. But just numbers, facts, simply wrong.

One example that stands out, he said that Phillip Green made £1.5 billion in 2009 and paid not a penny of tax on it. Note that year there.

If you look at the accounts for 2009 then Arcadia, the company that owns TopShop etc, in 2009 they had *sales* of £1.5 billion. On which they made about £150 million in profit. On which they paid around £50 million in corporation tax (these numbers are from memory so take them as being about right, not exact). You know, around and about the 30% of profit that the law says they should pay.

And no, they didn’t pay a dividend so there’s none of that “Tina Green lives in Monaco” stuff to bandy around either.

And P. Green is tax resident in the UK so he paid full UK income tax on his salary.

The guy simply got everything wrong, Hari that is.

Another was his claim that there were 20,000 bodies in the Baghdad morgue waiting to be identified. Err, no, that wouldn’t happen in a Muslim country where you’re supposed to bury the body within three days.

What there actually is is 20,000 photos of unidentified bodies so those searching for the missing can try to find them. And this point had been made in hte NYT four days before Hari’s column……he just missed the photos bit when he lifted the fact and thus made is grotesque with the pile of corpses.

At polemic he’s great, very good indeed. At journalism he’s appalling. You know, that comment is free, facts are sacred stuff?

I know the likes of Carolyn (“Bigger things to worry about folks. Leave Hari be.”) and Dr Paul (“Compared to these, Hari’s wrong-doings are fairly minor.”) think they’re doing him a favour, but Hari is on record as despising people who resort to whataboutery in order to change the subject. In fact, I always thought that that was one of his better pieces.

So while his defenders are welcome to resort to these tactics, they should be aware that Hari himself would describe them as “lame, lame arguments”, “almost always disingenuous” and a “crude attempt to change the subject”. Or at least he would if he wasn’t the subject of the discussion in question.

So while his defenders are welcome to resort to these tactics, they should be aware that Hari himself would describe them as “lame, lame arguments”, “almost always disingenuous” and a “crude attempt to change the subject”. Or at least he would if he wasn’t the subject of the discussion in question.

This is an excellent point, and anyone who recalls the 2003-era Johann model should recall very well exactly how much charity he was willing to grant others back then.

Which is to say, Hari and most of his critics were a bunch of twats years ago when they were pals, and the lot of them remain a bunch of twats now that they’ve fallen out.

And by the way, if a Wikipedia edit saying “(x) drinks too much” or “(x) has been accused of homophobia and antisemitism by (y) and (z)” are now actionable in the courts, you might as well just power down the entire internet right now. The legal bloodbath is going to wipe out half of the population.

I’m entirely in favour of people being allowed to use legal measures to protect themselves from malicious smear campaigns, but I’d hope that the law would show common sense on trivialities. Which these are.

“I’m entirely in favour of people being allowed to use legal measures to protect themselves from malicious smear campaigns, but I’d hope that the law would show common sense on trivialities. Which these are.”

They only stop being trivialities if they become a widespread perception of fact. I wasn’t aware that Cristina Odone had a reputation of being an anti-semite, and when I discovered that the sole source of this rumour was a pseudonymous Wikipedia edit, I wasn’t especially inclined to believe it. If Hari had published a column in the Independent headlined “Cristina Odone: Anti-Semite”, that would have been a very different matter – but I suspect that he’d have had difficulty getting that past the paper’s lawyers.

XXX (#86)

“But he was doing it too!” is the sort of argument you’d expect a ten-year-old to use, not one of Britain’s most prestigious journalists.

Well fair enough, so we should expect the same voluminous denunciations from Hari’s detractors of all their similarly-inclined colleagues.

And similar exiles for them too. Harvard is going to get very full. While London’s media offices will clog up with tumbleweed as a particularly dyslexic assistant picture editor and the man who fills the vending machines attempt to inform the nation.

I remember reading an article a while back about the US political situation, which featured some Tea Party members going around shouting “Obama’s a Muslim!” Now, maybe he *did* actually to meet some real people who happened to conform to the middle-class liberal-left stereotype of the Tea Party, but frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just made it up. I suspect lots of people will think the same.

You don’t say which date you refer to, but just over a year ago 34% of conservative Republicans believed that Obama was a Muslim. So among Tea Partiers it shouldn’t be impossible to find the odd one or two. Of course he may have written the whole thing sitting in London, but maybe everything in the Press is like that. You obviously need to extend your scepticism a bit wider.

The sight of pompous, tub thumping blowhards taking legal action against another columnist, just reveals them for their lily livered,thin skinned cry babies we all ways knew them to be.

We can thank Hari for reminding us what little shits Toby Young, Paul Staines,and Catholic bullies are.

I agree that statements on Wikipedia should not be actionable and Wikipedia should come with a huge health warning saying “Lying partisans are very likely to have edited this piece.” If it got to a court case and Lord High Court Judge peered over his specs and said, “What is Wikipedia?” the answer should be “M’lud it’s an unreliable version of an encyclopedia, reasonable if you’re looking up the date of the Battle of Hastings, but not for information on anyone living or dead or any matter on which you might expect to find partisanship.”

I’ve seen people solemnly defend Gilad Atzmon on the charges of antisemitism because his Wikipedia entry says it ain’t so. In fact his entry is constantly being chewed over and regurgitated, and is always a work in progress.

In fact, on the school curriculum there should be a special module on how to use the internet for information. I can see how Cristina Odone’s mother would be upset, but she was presumably an internet and Wikipedia virgin.

The thing about Hari and Wikipedia and his sock-puppetry is that he did so much of it, to an insane degree. Some people might do this a couple of times in fit of drunken mischief or fury but he went on with it for years. Something badly wrong there, I think.

And yes, of course his crimes are minor compared to the thorough truth and culture trashing of News International. But they are funny. You have to have a heart of stone not to laugh (not a plagiarism but a quote).

Of course the real Press scandal here is Sunny’s outrageous censorship of Flying Rodent’s original post. Look at the literary gems we have been deprived of:

I can almost hear that little vein on Toby Young’s temple throbbing, no doubt lending him the dignified air of an oversized, live-action bollock-torture sculpture. …

surely nobody deserves to have nasty things written about them on a web page. I mean, not only is such a thing unheard of, but that’s not what the internet is for, is it?

Mind you, I don’t know how Sunny finds the time to wield the blue pencil. What with all that thorough crushing of his enemies

I thought that was some of my finest work, even if do say so myself.

“The sight of pompous, tub thumping blowhards taking legal action against another columnist, just reveals them for their lily livered,thin skinned cry babies we all ways knew them to be. We can thank Hari for reminding us what little shits Toby Young, Paul Staines,and Catholic bullies are.”

And not just people taking legal action against columnists. Why, I recall a pompous tub-thumping blowhard threatening legal action against a high-profile group blog because he didn’t like what they’d written about him.

I wish I could remember who he was, as I’m sure Sally would want to condemn him just as vociferously. John somebody? Or was it Harry? No, it’s gone.

“Hari and most of his critics were a bunch of twats years ago when they were pals, and the lot of them remain a bunch of twats now that they’ve fallen out.”

I see rodent is persisting with his strawman depiction of Hari’s critics consisting merely of disilusioned former allies or right wingers, with not an honest journalist in site among those pissed off about this. Perhaps he could take a look at this:

“Up and down the UK local journalists are working for not much more than the minimum wage, doing the vital work of holding councils to account and reflecting the work of the justice system in our magistrates’ and county courts.

It’s hard work for long hours in an industry which each year sees hundreds of redundancies as ad revenues and circulations shrink by the week.

Despite all this, there is no shortage of would-be hacks out there. Each reporting job at my former paper would attract up to 70 applicants, all eager to work for not much more than the thrill of seeing their byline in print every day.

I hope, when Hari admits he has let people down, he’s thinking not just of the middle-class progressives who share many of his views (myself among them), but also of these men and women on the country’s Chronicles, Heralds and Echos.

Their careers are spent taking down quotes and reproducing them faithfully. Aside from the training which stresses accuracy above all else, the practical aspects of daily reporting leave a lasting imprint.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/steve-graves/johann-hari-debacle-what-_b_965931.html

Or are each of those local reporters just – how did rodent put it – “a bullshitter, a hack, a serial liar or all three “?

This is a feeble article which has deliberately distrorted and minimised the issue. Evidently it was just the ticket for Liberal Conspiracy, which, because Hari is a mate of Sunny’s preferred to offer a ‘Well, what’s the big dea, they’re all as bad as each other and it’s mostly sour grapes’ rationalisation of the scandal while pretending to have honestly examined the story.

It shows an apparent complete indifference as to whether the media tells the truth or not, a stance of convenience that will be worth recalling the next time Sunny or other areticel-writers here fulminate about a newspaper telling lies. Because as you’ve made clear here, it just doesn’t really matter does it. No big deal, nothing to see, move along. I hope to God none of the shoulder-shrugging or ‘whatabout’ comments on here are by members of the NUJ.

Of course the definitive statement on the whole Hari brouhaha was made long ago:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye

People are not defending Hari with whataboutery. In fact no one is defending him at all, just putting his dodgy journalistic practices in context – hey isn’t putting things in context what journos are supposed to do? It’s that the violence and longevity of the attack is a sign that it’s a fine old bit of whataboutery itself.

The amateur dramatics and professional bitchiness involved are so those performing can ease their conscience and assure themselves that nothing is wrong in British media. Cast the scapegoat out and the rest of the tribe can reassure itself that there was just one bad apple (you know like there was at News International). Everyone can go back to saying how wonderful and ethical they all are. If I were Flying Rodent, I might use the word “circle-jerk”.

Now all this is hysterically funny, because if anything is more ridiculous than the narcissism of small differences, it’s the narcissism of narcissism. This affair certainly has plenty of both. But nothing has actually happened to change the fairly toxic state of British journalism.

“Cast the scapegoat out and the rest of the tribe can reassure itself that there was just one bad apple (you know like there was at News International). Everyone can go back to saying how wonderful and ethical they all are”

Yet another strawman, which, like other posts on this thread, simply steps around the matter outlined in the article linked to above, preferring to pretend this is just a show put on by rival highly paid journalists on national papers, and that no one else honestly cares about it.

K B Player:
“I agree that statements on Wikipedia should not be actionable and Wikipedia should come with a huge health warning saying “Lying partisans are very likely to have edited this piece.” ”

That’s a good idea for op-ed articles too:

“Lying partisans are very likely to have wrote this piece”

Tim Worstall – it’s not just economics where Hari reveals himself to be a hapless bluffer (the most charitable explanation), as this painfully forensic fisking of his piece on Hugo Chávez by a journalist who has actually lived in Venezuela reveals only too clearly.

But the Independent is clearly just as culpable – what the hell did they think they were doing employing someone with no journalistic training at all as a foreign correspondent for a national newspaper? William Boot at least had the excuse of being fictional.

@103. Wetherby: “…what the hell did they think they were doing employing someone with no journalistic training at all as a foreign correspondent for a national newspaper?”

Indeed, what the hell did the publishers of untrained journalists Daniel Defoe and George Orwell think that they were doing?

troll “what the hell did they think they were doing employing someone with no journalistic training at all as a foreign correspondent for a national newspaper?”

HA HA HA

Have you see the human vomit that is employed in most of the national newspaper industry?

It is quite funny watching the trolls falling over themselves to have us believe that newspapers are bastions of integrity, morality, and honesty.

Priceless!

26. organic cheeseboard

It’s also worth noting that Cohen’s book What’s Left is primarily based on the work of others (as cursory ‘fact’-checking reveals), and this is more often than not unacknowledged.

I kind of doubt that. Cohen’s work is immediately recognisable as his own, it would be unlikely that anyone else would write like that. Or have those opinions.

That’s before we get to Harry’s Place and its regulars crowing over this – as if they’d never been guilty of obsessively trying to derail careers, re-edit wikipedia, and character assassination.

Really Org? When has HP ever tried to derail a career? When has anyone there re-edited Wikipedia? Or even assassinated someone’s character?

Hari’s piece says that he ignored the basic rule – don’t do stuff to people that you wouldn’t want done to yourself – and fair enough, he’s right.

Unfortunately so is Toby Young – this is not an apology, it is more self-serving, slippery self-justification. His problem was not that he ignored the Golden Rule. His problem was that he lied and cheated.

@Lamia: Perhaps he could take a look at this… Or are each of those local reporters just – how did rodent put it – “a bullshitter, a hack, a serial liar or all three “?

It’s entirely true that there are hard-working, honest journos the length of the land who will never achieve the prominence or remuneration of a cheat like Johann Hari. On the other hand, I’m not amenable at all to having them waved at me as if failure to accept your whole kit and caboodle were tantamount to pissing in their morning coffee. The reporter’s job is hard and unrewarding for most and that won’t change, regardless of whether Hari is crucified or congratulated, and implications to the contrary are a demeaning and highly patronising use of the old Won’t somebody think of the children gambit.

…preferring to pretend this is just a show put on by rival highly paid journalists on national papers, and that no one else honestly cares about it.

Jesus Christ. Clearly, it’s not enough that we agree that Hari is a wrong ‘un – that he’s violated the basic rules of his profession and that he deserves both condemnation and excommunication. Nope, we also have to agree that him pinching some quotes without saying so is an epic scandal and an affront to all that is right and true, and that the media circlejerk has not been a hackish pile-on, but is rather a noble and virtuous crusade for truth by disinterested pillars of virtue.

Well, call me unconvinced. To pick a few of the leading participants in the Hari pile-on: In the original “David Rose” article, Nick Cohen explicitly places this issue within the context of a pissy spat he had with Hari years ago, one that he has plainly held an almighty grudge over, and makes it plain that he has held back the Wikipedia-editing stuff for years, to be released at the point of maximum damage.

If Nick was so upset about Wiki-vandalism, he could’ve raised this at any time since. Instead, he demonstrated his characteristic habit of saying fuck all about issue (x) for years, then bravely charging in to shoot the wounded once somebody else had done all the fighting. This does not scream “Principled crusade for journalistic integrity” to me, because it isn’t one.

Elsewhere, Christina Odone is entirely blunt about having disliked Hari for years, and both she and Damian Thompson gave the game away a little when they chose to foreground the OMG filthy homo porno gay incest bummery grot aspect of this case. That certainly wasn’t necessary at all when the story is plagiarism and internet fuckery, and yet they chose to highlight it instantly.

You do have to wonder whether these two former editors of the Catholic Herald might have ulterior motives in wishing to damage Hari, who has previously penned some semi-hysterical and overblown demands to jail the Pope for alledgedly masterminding a universe-spanning kiddy-fiddling empire of doom. That’s before we get to the spectacle of two Telegraph bloggers bewailing the injury to UK journalism’s credibility, from the website of one of the nation’s premier outlets for idiotic woo on everything from climate change and abortion to immigration and taxation.

Let’s see, who else? Private Eye? Contributors – Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen, neither of whom can claim neutrality here. The less said about Guido Fawkes, the better, I think, and that’ll do for now.

So. I’m entirely fine with people like David Allen Green or any other journos who have a go at Hari for his cheating, without going entirely ballistic and over the top. He damn well deserves it, and more.

What I’m not fine with is a ridiculously overblown wankathon based on personal animus, fraudulently invoking some Olympian spirit in British journalism that clearly doesn’t exist, for the purposes of inflicting a punishment beating on some jumped up little tit for messing with the wrong people. Which is, very obviously, what has happened.

When has HP ever tried to derail a career?

Hilariously, this appears to be a serious question.

‘Personally, I’d like my enemies thoroughly crushed and my friends enjoying life. But that’s just me. Feel free to analyse that’.

Gosh, that sounds like the outpourings of a 13th Central Asian warlord.

Here’s my analysis, Sunny. You think you’re the internet’s equivalent of Jenghiz Khan, and that you’re all-conquering and invincible. But in fact you’re actually one of those unnamed thousands of Khwarezmid footsoldiers who ended up as a speed-bump for the Mongol hordes.

@ limping rat

Would you care to list the number of individuals whose careers HP has attempted to sabotage? Or can we add this to your long list of unsubstantiated assertions?

Would you care to list the number of individuals whose careers HP has attempted to sabotage?

There are probably quite a few – Mehdi Hasan certainly springs to mind – but the attacks (at least two that I’ve seen) on Paul Mason were particularly foul. As was running a piece by a supporter of Avigbor Lieberman calling for Jeremy Bowen to be sacked.

Harry’s Place has its good points. But its personal vindictiveness is second only to the way it makes merry with accusations of anti-semitism on the list of reasons why reading it often feels like gawping at the results of a car crash.

Elsewhere, Christina Odone is entirely blunt about having disliked Hari for years, and both she and Damian Thompson gave the game away a little when they chose to foreground the OMG filthy homo porno gay incest bummery grot aspect of this case.

I think that story is a complete red herring. For starters, unlike the Wikipedia affair it hasn’t been definitively proved that Hari had anything to do with it, and in any case it’s no more relevant to his suitability to be employed by a national newspaper than Alastair Campbell’s writing porn for Forum disqualified him from being Tony Blair’s press secretary. It would only become relevant if Hari himself were to pen a vitriolic denunciation of the spreading of filthy homo porno gay incest bummery grot in textual form.

Harry’s Place has its good points. But its personal vindictiveness is second only to the way it makes merry with accusations of anti-semitism on the list of reasons why reading it often feels like gawping at the results of a car crash.

When I popped into the Harry’s Place comments thread a few weeks back, I was called an anti-semite and a “fascist creep” within minutes of posting what I thought was a completely unexceptional and evidence-backed answer to a legitimate question. Though in the blog’s defence, plenty of people stepped in to defend me, and my accuser wasn’t part of the editorial team as far as I could see.

those above – cheers, you’ve answered those questions for me, as if they needed answering.

I’m entirely fine with people like David Allen Green or any other journos who have a go at Hari for his cheating, without going entirely ballistic and over the top. He damn well deserves it, and more. What I’m not fine with is a ridiculously overblown wankathon based on personal animus,

I’ve got to say that David Allen Green has gone way beyond focusing on the important stuff in this regard. He’s clearly a mate of Nick Cohen’s and it shows, because his obsessiveness about this wikipedia editing is just plain silly.

these people can’t simultaneously claim that Wikipedia is ultra-important and then at the same time ridicule Hari for making edits around Christmas (funny, too, how editing on Xmas day is somehow terrible in the eyes of hardline Catholics and anti-religion types alike).

Odone is the silliest for this – she tries to claim that wikipedia is ultra-important and then makes fun of Hari for, shock horror, cultivating an online following! I think she’s the one in need of journalism training there. But then again, Oliver Kamm is crowing over this too – I wonder what the dates of his Amazon ‘reviews’ of Chomsky are?

The fact is that almost everyone who’s jumped on this story – especially the wikipedia part – has a personal grudge against Hari, as Rodent points out. Whether these grudges are well-founded (maybe in the case of Harry’s Place, who he threatened to sue) or not (as in the case of Nick Cohen, whose terrible book was done justice to by Hari, and most of Cohen’s mates too), it’s still the case that the glee at Hari’s downfall is nothing to do with journalistic ethics – if it were, surely these people should be viciously rounding on a certain N Cohen for his libelling Nick Davies, for his regular misrepresentation of sources, etc, and surely they should be railing against Private Eye for the MMR stuff (and a shitload of other things they got badly wrong yet stuck to too), etc etc.

And just as a note – a lot of these people going so hilariously OTT slating Hari are the same ones who backed Emma ‘fabricator’ Brockes. can’t help wondering what would happen if we looked in ultra-forensic back over the wiki edits to her page…

a lot of these people going so hilariously OTT slating Hari are the same ones who backed Emma ‘fabricator’ Brockes.

This, in spades. IIRC. Oliver Kamm and Francis Wheen – at least one of them a fierce Hari circlejerker – actually wrote to the Graun back in the day to defend her on the grounds that her fabrications, while invented, were basically correct. Presumably, bullshit in the pursuit of causes they like is more acceptable.

Would you care to list the number of individuals whose careers HP has attempted to sabotage?

Off the top of my head? They tried to get Owen Hatherley barred from writing for the NS, because they wrongly believed he was SWP; when they were caught out, I recall they said that they were wrong, but still basically right.

That 17-year-old SWP girl who got a job working for Labour; That Newsnight editor they thought was SWP; That academic who posted the link to the David Duke site, whose employers’ contact details were repeatedly posted in the comments threads; That CND boss they’d confused with somebody else.

Hell, just last month they published photos and details of some 21 year old woman with whose politics they didn’t like, noted her place of work and quoted her saying “Sittin on the toilet at work and spotted this LOL”, to which the above the line poster responded, “At work, eh?

I mean, that’s just what I can think of without looking. Broaden the parameters out to “Tried to damage their careers by making highly tendentious and negative assertions about” and we’re talking hundreds of people, I’d have thought.

I think you’ve got the wrong end of this one, Flying Rodent.

This story will keep on giving until such time as Hari, Kelner and Blackhurst have owned up and have dealt with the problem they have created.

Three times now an apology has been made for the things for which JH is very publicly bang to rights, lying again about other stuff which has turned out to be wrong, and ignoring some things which are known but not widely.

In the meantime Kelner has somewhere around couple of hundred dodgy articles in his archive, and he seems to have stuck his head down a rabbit hole.

There’ll be another episode if JH keeps writing for the NYT, another when he comes back, and each time something new comes out until it has all been dragged out.

As you say – lots of popcorn, but not for the reason you think.

BTW does anybody have a figure for Hari’s total output (including borrowings) in the Indy?

This story will keep on giving until such time as Hari, Kelner and Blackhurst have owned up and have dealt with the problem they have created.

Oh God, I hope so. This could run and run.

@Fr

Looking forward to your “Christmas Pantomime” piece .

Hari is another member of the privately educated elite who thinks that truth and honesty is only for the proles.

And then they wrap it up as socialist concern.

He’s a toff. Remember that.

organic cheeseboard,

I’m entirely fine with people like David Allen Green or any other journos who have a go at Hari for his cheating, without going entirely ballistic and over the top. He damn well deserves it, and more. What I’m not fine with is a ridiculously overblown wankathon based on personal animus,

I’ve got to say that David Allen Green has gone way beyond focusing on the important stuff in this regard. He’s clearly a mate of Nick Cohen’s and it shows, because his obsessiveness about this wikipedia editing is just plain silly.

To be fair to Green, in connection with this, he said at least once that Cohen is a friend (oh, at least twice, in fact).

these people can’t simultaneously claim that Wikipedia is ultra-important and then at the same time ridicule Hari for making edits around Christmas (funny, too, how editing on Xmas day is somehow terrible in the eyes of hardline Catholics and anti-religion types alike).

In terms of Christmas Day, Green said it seemed “sad”, not terrible – as in, did Hari really have nothing better to do on Christmas Day?

And sure, in the scheme of things – like the famine in East Africa that the media seems to be bored by – all this is beyond trivial. But it’s still wrong, though.

@ 117

He’s a toff. Remember that.

According to Hari’s website, his dad was a bus driver. My mum was a GP. What does that make me – the Duke of Frigging Devonshire?

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Hari:

‘Having attended fee-paying John Lyon School (affiliated to Harrow School) and Woodhouse College[1] he graduated with a double first in Social and Political Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, in 2001.’

OK, he passed an exam and he may have got a bursary, but it wasn’t your local comprehensive.

OK, he passed an exam and he may have got a bursary, but it wasn’t your local comprehensive.

So not a toff then.

He grew up in a working-class family. He got, through his own merit, a scholarship to Posh School and entry to Cambridge. This is what we-of-the-left want to happen, isn’t it?

john b, do try to keep up – we-of-the-left want posh schools torn down and elite universities to lose their power. You can start off working class and transmogrify into a toff, you know.

(am I joking or not? I’m not sure)

To be fair to Green, in connection with this, he said at least once that Cohen is a friend (oh, at least twice, in fact).

well yes, but this reinforces my point that the Hari-crowing is really about Hari’s having made a few enemies, as opposed to genuine outrage. I cannot believe for one second that Green would be posting multiple blog entries if it weren’t for the fact he’s mates with cohen. Which rather undermines any kind of genuine disquiet as wikipedia edits. it’s a fake hysteria. and to reiterate, Hari’s review of cohen’s book was almost entirely spot on – Cohen couldn’t handle it and went nuts, including calling Hari a ‘Maoist’ – surely a more serious libel than Hari idenitfying Nick’s potential problems with alcohol, clear for all to see via video and reported on in the past by Private Eye?

in terms of Christmas Day, Green said it seemed “sad”, not terrible – as in, did Hari really have nothing better to do on Christmas Day?

compared to the hari-hating oliver kamm, who apparently spent several full days of his life obsessively reviewing the work of someone he hates on amazon?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AT547I3XYU4LS/ref=cm_aya_pdp_profile

I dunno. This circlejerk of hari-gloating is embarrassing for everyone involved. People like allen green should know better.

organic cheeseboard,

To be fair to Green, in connection with this, he said at least once that Cohen is a friend (oh, at least twice, in fact).

well yes, but this reinforces my point that the Hari-crowing is really about Hari’s having made a few enemies, as opposed to genuine outrage. I cannot believe for one second that Green would be posting multiple blog entries if it weren’t for the fact he’s mates with cohen. Which rather undermines any kind of genuine disquiet as wikipedia edits.

Well, perhaps you’re right that Green wouldn’t, but I’ve always thought he seemed a reasonable fellow, so I prefer to err that way.

in terms of Christmas Day, Green said it seemed “sad”, not terrible – as in, did Hari really have nothing better to do on Christmas Day?

compared to the hari-hating oliver kamm, who apparently spent several full days of his life obsessively reviewing the work of someone he hates on amazon?

If by “someone” you mean Chomsky, Kamm appears to have 42 book reviews on Amazon, only 7 of which are of books by Chomsky (it appears that Chomsky has published more than 7 books – 30 by a rough count). Should people only read and review books by authors they ‘like’?

I have no idea how we got on to Kamm v Chomsky in the first place. Are you ‘obsessed’ with Kamm? You have mentioned him twice in seven posts..

Did Kamm review those books on Christmas Days? Perhaps someone gives him a Chomsky every year for a laugh.

i only mention kamm because he’s just as enthusiastic an online warrior as Hari – and yet Kamm is a vociferous member of the Hari-hater crew who are ridiculing him for, er, being an online obsessive.

I’ve mentioned David Allen Green more than him too. i think Green’s made a very bad error of judgment in getting so caught up in the wiki-edits thing – it doesn’t actually matter much at all in the end and is entirely motivated by his being mates with Nick Cohen, who has in the past given himself favourable wikipedia edits.

I’m not ‘obsessed’ with either Green or Kamm, but it’s important to point out, as the Rodent has, that they’re protesting too much – all of them – and it’s based on personal grudges rather than a love for journalistic truth.

If it were, then Kamm, Wheen et al wouldn’t have staunchly defended Emma Brockes, guilty of what I would argue is a far more serious breach of ethics than Hari – at least his fabrications were based on truths… and one wonders who’s editing his wiki site, as opposed to hers.

Organic:-

David Allen Green says he is not going to pursue the David Rose sock-puppetry any more.

I am drawing a line and moving on. There is really no pleasure to being involved in this sort of activity, especially against a fellow secularist and liberal, and someone whose writing I still admire. The identity of “David Rose” has now been admitted,.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/09/hari-rose-wikipedia-admitted

I can’t speak for Green’s motives for pursuing this but it looks like as well as helping out his mate Cohen the detective instinct kicked in – WTF was going on?

I’m coming to the point that if anyone shrugs off Hari’s extensive and prolonged sock-puppetry that I start wondering what do they do in their spare time. This was not the odd spot of Wikipedia editing in a fit of mischief or fury or drunkenness, this was systematic and elaborate.

some of the behaviour that “David Rose” has engaged in is genuinely bizarre. At one stage Johann Hari quotes David Rose in his blog, giving him biographical details like “a starred first from a degree specialising in environmental science at Cambridge, and extensive work in Antarctica observing the effects of global warming”, to support a point Hari himself is making. Green counts “at least fifteen biographical facts (from a lawyer girlfriend in Walthamstow and subbing jobs at the Independent and Spectator, to a principled and noisy opposition to the invasion of Iraq)” about David Rose, none of which were true, because there is no David Rose. “[It] was a fluent stream of lies contrived just so that the systemic smear campaign and dishonest self-promotional exercise could carry on and never be exposed”, he says. Snowdon mentions an example in which two apparent Hari sockpuppets, David Rose and “Jessica”, talk amongst themselves and pretend to get in touch with Hari himself over the choice of picture on his Wikipedia entry, and another in which he spent some time “emphasising his own importance as a major cultural figure”.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100105678/we-lefties-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-forgive-johann-hari/

It’s totally crazy. If you found yourself going about the internet under the name of Chemical Butter and saying “organic cheeseboard is cool” and “the enemies of organic cheeseboards are the spawn of Satan” 100s of times wouldn’t you start thinking you were being a bit weird? And then started to build some kind of identity for Chemical Butter? Even weirder if you were an established journalist in a national newspaper.

these people can’t simultaneously claim that Wikipedia is ultra-important and then at the same time ridicule Hari for making edits around Christmas (funny, too, how editing on Xmas day is somehow terrible in the eyes of hardline Catholics and anti-religion types alike).

It’s not “terrible”. But it gives the impression of a sad, Hari-no-mates, so obsessive with bolstering himself and doing down his enemies that he’s at it on Christmas Day.

organic cheeseboard,

To be clear, I didn’t think you were obsessed by Kamm, I just wondered what frequency of comments about a particular topic would lead people to think “that person is obsessed”: 7 out of 42 doesn’t seem particularly frequent.

i only mention kamm because he’s just as enthusiastic an online warrior as Hari – and yet Kamm is a vociferous member of the Hari-hater crew who are ridiculing him for, er, being an online obsessive.

When you say Kamm is “just as enthusiastic an online warrior as Hari”, do you mean he has done things equivalent to assuming multiple identities (including one that apparently had a degree in Climate Change), made them argue with each other, and under those make some 800 edits on Wikipedia and post comments elsewhere on the intertubes that were favourable to Kamm and his friends and unfavourable to Kamm’s ‘enemies’?

I ask because I’m not familiar with Kamm’s online activities, or Cohen’s.

If it were, then Kamm, Wheen et al wouldn’t have staunchly defended Emma Brockes, guilty of what I would argue is a far more serious breach of ethics than Hari – at least his fabrications were based on truths… and one wonders who’s editing his wiki site, as opposed to hers.

Who is “his” (sorry), is it Kamm, Wheen or Hari? Do you mean Hari’s fabrications were based on truth? Are we talking about the same Hari?

[the wiki-edits thing] doesn’t actually matter much at all in the end

Of course it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, as I said before it is beyond trivial, relatively speaking – any East Africans reading might think, “Christ, we’re struggling to feed ourselves and our kids and these guys are arguing about someone who lied on the internet“.

It does matter to some people though – it seems to matter to Johann Hari a lot. And ISTM principle behind Wikipedia is worthy, I often find it a useful resource, and Hari has poisoned it somewhat. He has poisoned (disproportionately, yes) its reputation and the reputations of its editors with whom he disagreed under his multiple identities. I think Hari has also poisoned some people’s views of the Independent, certainly mine.

Well if Flying Rodent wanted proof here it is. Five days later and the gift is still giving.

I suppose I ought to reply to Lamia back at #100, who accused me of setting up:

Yet another strawman, which, like other posts on this thread, simply steps around the matter outlined in the article linked to above, preferring to pretend this is just a show put on by rival highly paid journalists on national papers, and that no one else honestly cares about it.

Well a show put on by rival highly paid journalists on national papers …that no one else honestly cares about is more or less exactly what it is (Less highly paid bloggers also appear involved. I am unaware of the rate of pay for sock-puppets).

However I thought I’d read the article by Steve Graves to which Lamia referred:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/steve-graves/johann-hari-debacle-what-_b_965931.html

This will be deeply touching I thought. An account of local journalists, working long unsociable hours for minimum wages; forever at threat of redundancy or even their paper closing; worried about not being able to report things that might offend local dignitaries; terrified that something they write, however true or justified, might cause the Council to withdraw advertising or encourage a lawsuit that would cripple their paper; aware that they will never make it to the national press where all the positions are taken by well connected sprogs down from Oxbridge; knowing that in the unlikely event that anything they investigate or produce is taken up by the nationals (and why should it, we all know the only locally derived news the public are interested in occurs in London’s more fashionable postcodes) then they will likely get neither pay nor credit. And as they huddle round their half of mild with six straws, they say to each other: never mind our woes, what really matters is that Johann Hari is a bit careless with his cut and paste – this is what is destroying freedom of expression today.

Of course Grave’s article is nothing of the sort. If you read it rather than quote-mine it, it’s a level-headed discussion of something that’s been a problem with the London papers since Murdoch’s de-unionisation. National journalists are no longer obliged to serve an apprenticeship on local papers papers or learn skills such as shorthand or accuracy. This is convenient for the gilded youth, swanning down from Uni, and for the newspaper owners, able to employ the right sort of people with the right political convictions and connections. Old fashioned skills such as correct reporting and a desire to objectively inform the public are certainly not wanted.

The Hari ‘scandal’, both in its origin and the overblown reaction to it, is a classic symptom of the airless, infighting, personality obsessed micro-world that has resulted. But as Graves points out:

We cannot blame Johann Hari or the many others like him for the fact they don’t have some of the most basic skills of their trade. That’s the fault of an industry which has lost its way in so many areas, from plurality of ownership to the phone-hacking scandal.

Lamia may hope that the scapegoat is really a scarecrow, but neither will clear the British press of it’s problems. Admitting them would be a start.

Sorry about that “it’s” in the last line.

Actually I only returned to this thread to sulk because no one picked up my bit of reporting at #84 that during the few days that Christina Odone’s Wikipedia entry was vandalised with:

Her former colleagues Jackie Ashley and Johann Hari have accused her of anti-Semitism and homophobia

Her husband appears to me to have edited her entry but not bothered to delete that. Still maybe everyone else knows her better than him.