Johann Hari interviewing scandal
Much ado about nothing or a shocking admission
http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/06/independent-columnist-johann-hari.html
Thread not appearing correctly? Click here to rebuild | Report this
- In Photos: Public Enemy @ UEA, Norwich
- DiS joins the Music Alliance Pact + May 2013's global MAP compilation
- Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
- 30 Seconds To Mars - LOVE LUST FAITH + DREAMS
- Come - Eleven: Eleven (reissue)
- In Photos: Counting Crows @ Manchester Apollo
- In Photos: Cold War Kids @ The Forum, London
- The Fall - Re-Mit
Twitter
Facebook
Last.fm
SoundCloud
MySpace
Friendster
RSS
Not very much ado about not very much
Seems pretty dishonest.
But everyone does it so it's ok.
does everyone do it? i can't imagine doing it w/o saying, 'oh this is from a book...' and i cant find the tweet but the guardian news editor was saying something like she knew 'no-one she respected who did that'.
this is annoying because no-one cares about that silly blog
it's these two that are interesting
http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/hari-karihackery/
http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/hari-kari-ii-a-multitude-of-sins/
if you cant be arsed to read the suggestion is that not only does he quote from other writers on Hari passing it off as his own interview, he also decontextualises and changes the implications of these quotations to paint Negri in a particularly partisan light and invents/exagerrates elements of the interview process itself to achieve the same.
Obviously in the grand scheme of the world it doesn't really matter, but in the slightly smaller scheme of caring about Johann Hari and the british liberal newspaper columnists, i'd say it's pretty damming on his credibility.
whats annoying about that first blog is Hari + everyone else has read that and either got upset or gone 'Ah, whatever' when that's not really the point at all.
glimpsing back at this thread, i should point out Charlemange i didn't to suggest it was annoying that you linked to that, rather that it was annoying that was what the debate and Hari's piece in response had centred on.
http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23interviewsbyhari
i feel pretty sorry for him now tho.
the thing is i really like Johann Hari, and there aren't many high-profile gay left-wing journalists writing so i don't really want to see him driven out w/ pitchforks but at the same time, i wish he would pay more attention to facts/good practice. be that here, or when talking about muslim homophobia.
never heard of it.
(i suppose i meant columnists, because bbc journalists are meant to be impartial idk.)
And of course, you've met/shagged all of them
what with you being gay and that.
I believe
he doesn't think he's done anything wrong, and I don't think it's out-and-out plagiarism. However, his quote-mining is a very dodgy practice, and if he doesn't come out with a full-blown mea culpa very soon it could properly screw his career (which would be a big shame - he's a great writer and, most of the time, a very good journalist indeed)
he never seems to think he's done anything wrong whenever his facts turn out to be dodgy/misleading. maybe this is the problem.
Does this happened often?
http://www.medialens.org/index.php?searchword=johann+Hari&ordering=&searchphrase=exact&Itemid=64&option=com_search
most recent one was his article on homophobia in islam which was chock-full of bollocks:
http://howupsetting.tumblr.com/post/3619437971/can-we-talk-about-liberal-bias-now
http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/can-we-talk-about-johann-haris-shoddy-journalism-now/
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/02/can-we-finally-talk-about-johann-haris.html
Ta
Will have a look at these later
Ta
Will take a look later
When has he made things up?
He's pinched quotes and not attributed them - it's not the same thing.
i think the whole:
'Chris Brown rubbed his hands through his hair, shook my by the wrists, and cried 'I hate Israel and those bloody new-good jews'. i sat back in my chair, relieved, as after an especially good jog. i knew i'd got what i'd come for'
where none of those things actually happened is what N_Dubs is pointing to
to quote Negri's publicist:
A few minor, but incorrectly reported, details that I have personal knowledge of (eg,there was no taxi called, I didn’t say the things ascribed to me, Negri wasn’t behaving arrogantly as suggested, there was no angry confontation with ICA staff, etc) casts serious doubt on the veracity of anything that Hari says.”
we stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice..
he's not just taken a quote from elsewhere, he's written stage directions for the play or film version, in which all these quotes from books will be said, dramatically, by the interviewee.
It's not something I can get too worked up about but it seems rather shoddy.
There's a lot of good novelists in our national press then
Melanie Phillips calls herself a columnist...
I'm enjoying the #interviewsbyhari hashtag on twitter.
twitterstormzz!!
yeah. i'm pretty embarrassed by that element of it. i hope people go back and read the DSG blog and just ignore the twitter frenzy element because i think that raises a point far more important than the simple referencing thing which is Hari using those kind of journalistic untruths to suggest political untruths - Negri is some terrible axe-wielding war criminal. I don't know why people can't reflect on that as opposing to attacking this much less pressing argument of how a journalist should reference.
that said, I really, really hope Hari doesn't just see it as 'cyber-bullying' or whatever and uses it as an opportunity to self-reflect and in the future pay more attention to checking his facts/referencing correctly.
the man who confused Clint Eastwood with John Wayne..
regardless of the topic (oppressed gays in Iran or Wales, the state of social care, whatever), I've always thought odds are he's full of shit about everything he writes about.
Yesterday, a Republican presidential hopeful
confused John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy Jr.
I love that Sufjan Stevens song John Wayne
Just when it looked like people were laughing at Hari,
along comes Toby Young to remind you of what a column from a real cunt looks like: http://t.co/FF9t3eF
hmm... interesting
http://bit.ly/jhGWPB
This isn't the first time that Hari's been caught out for something like this.
There was an article he had written a few years back about humanitarian intervention and his view that US political elites were changing their minds about the sense of propping up violent dictators for the sake of stability in the Middle East. Media Lens (a Chomskyite left-wing media watchdog website) picked him up on some points and exchanged some emails with him over what he'd said.
Media Lens is pretty left-wing, so bear that in mind, but during the exchange Hari said that he'd spoken to Chomsky at length at a New Statesman lunch in London and Noam had backed him up on this. Media Lens emailed Chomsky, who got back to the them and basically said, "I don't remember talking to Johann at the lunch, I might have met him at the buffet, but there's no way I said what he's quoted me as saying because I do not and have never taken that position."
Read for yourself here: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/03/031204_Johann_Hari_2.HTM
Basically, I don't like Hari as a journalist. He willfully introduces hyperbole into his articles on a regular basis, and I never feel like it's entirely truthful. All his little weasel words make it seem like he's always pushing an agenda first and picking the facts to fit it later. I usually find his arguments quite weak on a purely rational level, and he relies too much on anecdotal examples to back them up - he'll talk about 'a woman' who was assaulted and extrapolate that across the whole of society. No details of who the woman is. No age given. None of the basic stuff that journalists SHOULD put in as standard practice to enable independent verification by others of what he's saying. A lot of the time he comes across as a left-wing Richard Littlejohn without the self-knowing.
Whatever his flaws
Comparing anyone to the waste of space that is Littlejohn is way too harsh
oh god
the inevitable Richard Littlejohn column about this is going to be excruciating
have you seen the Toby Young one, ^upthread?
Johan Hari is full of shit
Can't stand him or people like him
Try a link next time
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-my-journalism-is-at-the-centre-of-a-storm-this-is-what-i-have-learned-2304199.html
Fair enough.
The last full para seems to cover everything that needs to be said.
The apology itself is top notch. He gives an explanation beforehand of his methods and it really made me a convert to the Hari cause. The tributes to his interviewees seemed genuine and he almost had to stifle a tear when talking about the near-death of his career, but he did it in such a way where it didn't seem contrived.
ironic when you consider he can't get through Empire, which i'm guessing is on the reading-list for first-year sociology students
my friend who's a second-year politics student had to read it. quite enjoyed it, he said.
'as he brused his hand through his hair, leant forward and sighed....' etc.
But not really.
It doesn't address the motivation behind his actions. With Negri in particular, it was done to misrepresent him.
It's true. No one in journalism ever made someone feel misrepresented in print.
It's a shocking thing to suddenly happen and I for one will never view the world in the same way again.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-spot-a-lame-lame-argument-1667373.html
better than I thought it would be but...
'I did not and never have taken words from another context and twisted them to mean something different'
well, yes you did.
'This is one reason why none of my interviewees have, to my knowledge, ever said they were misquoted in my nearly 10 years with The Independent'
coupled w/ Independant editor on twitter saying
'@JohannHari101 has worked at @theIndynews for 10 years. In that time, we have not had a single complaint about his misrepresenting anyone'
Well, two Negri scholars and his publicist did complain of misrepresentation so..
It's weird how far Hari himself has driven the story, his first response focused on quote-mining so the 'twitterstorm' or w/e focussed on quote-mining, then now he apologises for quote-mining and that's that's done. Although people (idiots, mainly) go on about twitter democraticises things it still really the powerful (kelner, Hari) to stonewall what seem to be clears facts and arguments in same way they've done since idk, time ad infinitum or w/e.
sort of like Moscovici's experiment w/ the blue slides
last thing i'll say probably
weird that loads of bloggers from the left, Laurie Penny, Adam Ramsay et al were coming out in support of Hari given that he used to exact same/if not worse tactics to smear Negri as the Mail etc. used to smear them post-march 26. not much solidarity there really.
Johann Hari in presenting misleading and ill-formed journalism shock!
Private Eye proved he made shit up years ago anyway.
I can't fucking stand the twerp.
+
http://brianwhelan.net/post/7039951732/time-to-come-clean-johann-hari
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/chavez-hari-interview-goodbye
http://brianwhelan.net/post/7007213610/lets-crowd-check-haris-quotes
I kind of don't care
I think it's one of those stories that meedja people think is more interesting than it is because it's about other meedja people.
i agree to some extent, but then i think there are some interesting issues raised about how far Marxism is a 'discounted ideology', how far we can relativise alleged violence in dictatorships (Mandela vs. Negri?), How far critical theory is relevant to mainstream discourse? How important a person's character is to their ideas? (Hari wants us to think Negri is a pyschopath, doesn't he?) etc.
But then most twitterers and Radio4, Newsnight etc. seem to have glossed over that and are just interested in far how far you should properly reference your sources when writing a newspaper article. BORING.
.
..
...
If homophobia had a smell, what would that smell be like?
I'm going to say old spice and WD-40
Carling and McCoy;s
tbh
I immensely dislike the fat-faced twat, so I kinda hope he gets a kicking over this.
CH CH CH
CH-CHAAANGES!
I think Hari can on occasion make good points
But he writes in this really whiny woe is me faux sixth former style that really annoys me.
And his voice, good god his voice
i know i've been thinking about this too much but i think an interesting thing about it is that it's Hari's sense of completely black-and-white moral indignation that both leads to the things which are really good (writings on the Congo, coaltion etc.) but also which underscore this. I think the reason he wanted Negri to look bad is because he firmly believes that the Gulags etc. were really terrible, and that's true and fair enough. However I think that black-and-white moral system becomes problematic when it extends to anyone seen as engaging w/ the ideological grounds that shaped the 20th century and continue to shape the world today (perhaps through their absence).
The same thing applies to his writings on Zizek*; I think Hari has a real problem w/ ambiguity so the endless deconstructions of Zizek, the complexities of Negri or equally Queer theory* drive him nuts because they don't say THIS IS WHAT I HATE, and equally even w/o really getting to know or research these things (he calls Zizek a 'postmodernist' which is just barmy/admits he hasn't read Empire) he feels the need to place himself in opposition to it, to use some theory he'd hate like Dollimore's concept of the proximate, having something close to you so that you can make sure it is something other than you (maybe his sleeping with a neo-nazi in 2002* is another example of this). A final example is his response to criticism upon his interpretation of Catholic dogma to which he apparently said "hope one day you have an awareness of the despicable and evil crime you are defending, and apologize to the victims", being irritated w/ a reader for not placing themselves in that artificial unequivocal moral position to the proximate*.
*http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2007/04/slavoj-zizek-intellectual
*http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/johann-hari-the-hidden-history-of-homosexuality-in-the-us-2300636.html (altho I like this article)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/dec/13/gayrights.thefarright
*I dont like this blog but http://dolphinarium.blogspot.com/2010/03/johann-haris-rude-and-bigoted-reply-to.html. Although reference to victims occurs in both, I think important thing w/ Negri is move from offending victims as w/ 'Catholic supporter' to actually creating victims, which there's no evidence to suggest Negri did.