The Independent C/D

Darius chatting with Boris...

http://www.channel4.com//services/videoplayer/popup.jsp?name=Dispatches_BorisAudio

"...he will not be put into intensive care..."

OMFG that Guppy article is like reading Ezra Pound on economics back in the 1930s.

― aka best bum of the o_O's (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, June 14, 2011 2:10 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i've never been bothered to get into it and barely know what it is, but it's sort of fascinating how little 'social credit' survived as a thing

it's got a small element of accurate analysis of the way banking system works, a big slice of scrawled-on-the-back-of-a-mental-hospital-napkin economic theory, and a dash of anti-Semitism to go

the independent on sunday is possibly even worse than the observer

http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/06/independent-columnist-johann-hari.html

http://johannhari.com//2011/06/27/interview-etiquette

https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23interviewsbyhari

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwlQ2B9trr0

hari is dogshit

xp lol

Johan Hari in "total idiot" shocka

What he did was wrong and not common practice but I get the feeling that a lot of the outrage is more to do with finally having a legitimate lightning rod for prior annoyance with Hari than the seriousness of the offence.

I've distrusted Hari, even when I want to agree with him, for years due to a suspicion of overdramatisation and I've been proved right. Exactly the sort of writer who gives left-leaning columnists a bad name.

Well, at least he's only putting words in someone else's mouth. http://devukha.blogspot.com/2003/03/ooooh-topical-or-what-just-as-i-was.html

Any bets on who is going to be eviscerated by a Twitter lynchmob tomorrow?

graham linehan?

ok probably not, but ive learnt the hard way that you've got to embrace hope

Any bets on who is going to be eviscerated by a Twitter lynchmob tomorrow?

Twynched?

His attitude of "Gideon Levy never objected, and guys it's me, Johan, everything I do is amazing!" isn't particularly helpful to his cause. Of course I'm paraphrasing remarks he made in another context, or wrote, or something.

Twynched?

twatted

dl otm

Although Toby Young having a pop at him over ethics on the Telegraph site it is a bit rich. There have been plenty of plagiarism accusations against him, which involve him taking other people's words as his own rather than putting them in the mouths of the people who said them, albeit at different times.

kinda feel sorry for him, almost, having to write for the independent being terribly overpromoted at a young age. i would have killed to have been overpromoted, obvi, but it can't be good for you really.

See: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/did_toby_young_plagiarize_pass.htmlAnd: http://assistantbrighton.blogspot.com/2007/02/toby-young-and-plaigiarism.html

Sorry, I'll try that again.
See: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/did_toby_young_plagiarize_pass.html

And also: http://assistantbrighton.blogspot.com/2007/02/toby-young-and-plaigiarism.html

being terribly overpromoted at a young age

Surprised to learn he's 32!

apparently lolrie penny (wordplay) is an indie colum nist now?

Non-attribution of quotes is totally unacceptable, and Hari's Twitter mates should be ashamed for supporting him on this. (I used to hang out a bit with Johann when I was younger, and like him very much, if that matters. But he's got no leg to stand on here. It's just obviously wrong.)

it seems such a weird thing to do. i don't know why anyone would do it, let alone think it would be okay.

i sort of understand how it happens. from what i can tell the q&a format is a bit of a swizz. and he's pushed it further. it is wrong though, the making things up.

but taking stuff out of other stuff the person has written and pretending they said it to you: so bizarre.

i mean, i get guilty when i don't let on in a piece that the interview was a phoner and that i can only describe the subject's location because they told me what the room they were sitting in was like.

but taking stuff out of other stuff the person has written and pretending they said it to you: so bizarre.

yeah this is the main thing: he leaned into me, all that

im shit at interviews

I'm trying to imagine a music journalist asking a rock legend for an oft-told anecdote, getting a rushed version, and then printing the vivid, detailed version from the star's memoir. That would be weird. I can't imagine it ever crossing my mind as an option.

"When I talked to DL about his bafflement about Hari's approach, I noticed a sad but steely glint in his pixels..."

why has this story only "broken" now? it was going around twitter a couple of weeks ago. initially i wasn't outraged cuz it was just one interview seven years ago when he was like 12, but knowing there are another two recent ones and that he's defending the practice, it's just stupidly egregious.

that said i think his "the plural of anecdote is data" style of writing is actually far more insidious a form of bad journalism that he's far from alone in. and regardless of the interview plagiarism he is just a pretty annoying writer.

it is so weird...i feel guilty if i add in an "and" or split up sentences to make the piece have a nicer rhythm...

I dunno, I totally understand the impulse for doing it -- interviews are high pressure if you're writing for a big publication and the interviewee doesn't "deliver". Or you fudge it. But it totally seems... not on, like cheating at a pub quiz or something.

I usually compensate for my subjects' rambling in speech by condensing slightly, but if I think it's going to be an issue I discuss it with the subject before we start and get their permission to smooth things over in print. I mean, one of the most annoying things about listening to playbacks is my own umms and ahs ASKING the questions. If my subject had given an answer that was lacklustre in comparison to written eloquence on a particular question, I'd quote from the text (cited as such) and contrast it with the warm slice of DUH provided on the day. THAT is how to handle JH's stated dilemma.

Yes, it's weird because it's effectively harder work to copy a quote and "insert" it an to just cite it directly. Besides, quoting a book seems doubly appropriate if your interviewee actually wrote the thing.

Sorry, should be "THan to just cite it"

Tidying up an interview response is fine: most speech when directly transcribed is messy. But tidying up just means taking out the ers, deleting the false starts (and sometimes not), and helping the subject get from a to b. It doesn't mean taking their words from somewhere else entirely.

and when i think an interviewee's already given the "perfect" response to a question i want to cover, it's easy to write that "[x interviewee] told [y publication] blah blah blah" rather than passing it off as a quote i got out of them.

an interviewee would have to spectacularly dull and monosyllabic to not deliver the bare minimum i need, there's always material there even if not in the actual words they say. only once have i had to say to the pr afterwards, look, i just need more time with them because they said NOTHING...

When I do an interview it feels like at least half my job is asking the questions and generating the chemistry necessary to produce the best quotes possible - it's not all about the write-up. If that doesn't happen, it's just cheating to pluck the perfect formulation from elsewhere. Neither reader nor subject suffer - you could argue both benefit - but it's just not sound journalism. Attribution isn't hard. Also, it's not as if he reached for one in desperation - the Gideon Levy interview is full of quotes cut-and-pasted from multiple sources.

That said, I don't think it's a terrible sin and if he'd just made a decent apology and hadn't fudged it with that blog post it wouldn't be half as big an issue.

Agree with Lex and Dorian: your job is to get the best answer, and if you need to take the answer from elsewhere, credit it.

another two dodgy hari interviews :/

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/chavez-hari-interview-goodbye
http://brianwhelan.net/post/7039951732/time-to-come-clean-johann-hari

it'd be interesting to know how much of hari's stuff which can't be independently verified is fabricated. i do not believe a single word of this, for instance:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/dec/13/gayrights.thefarright

the institute for historical review (not "of", as hari has it, he can't even get that right) did have a conference in 2002, but it was in irvine, california, not los angeles as hari says. at the time, the institute only made the location available to registered attendees, so he perhaps thought he couldn't be contradicted if he just guessed.

idk, it's a continuous urban area so maybe he thought it was still the same city, despite being 40 miles away. but if he'd been there, he'd have read the name of the hotel, which would have been the marriott irvine. never happened imo.

TBF conflating irvine with Los Angeles is not a particularly unusual or egregious error.

Not a bad success rate for a fatty who looks about 12 (xp)

his piece on muslim homophobia in east london didn't exactly ring true either

... before you howl disapproval, he's looking rather svelte these days (xp)

xp, yes, the East London piece seemed a little too pat to be true.

He has made an apology for the interview technique, though, and said he won't do it again. It's a little more humble than he initially seemed intent on playing it.

TBF conflating irvine with Los Angeles is not a particularly unusual or egregious error.

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Wednesday, 29 June 2011 13:31 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

but one you'd be less likely to make if you attended the hotel and it had "irvine" in the name? and more likely to make if all you knew was the conference was taking place somewhere in california?

also, lexisnexis has no record of him ever writing a story about this conference, until he mentions it in the guardian piece.

Yeah, conflating OC/LA not the biggest annoying thing because it's still greater LA - and because of subs and long-ago-ness, JH may not be the person who specified LA. Legally, in an interview situation, you *can* pull quotes without attribution because they are the subject's words and not the writer's - all those warmly affirmative quotes from press releases that get dropped in profiles or features have been sent to the writer in the hope that this might happen. You can even grab a quote from another interview by another journalist, for the same reason - even though some notion of fair play suggests that attribution is desirable, it's not compulsory. Personally, I'd never substitute a chunk of the subject's writing for their speech on the day or refuse to attribute another writer's quote of the person in the unlikely event that I couldn't get much from them.

As a comparison, the other night the announcer on the World Service said Michele Bachmann represented 'Minnesota' which was a bad elision of the tradition of address being 'the Congressional representative from Minnesota' (which is correct) and the standard 'representing Minnesota's 6th district'. She doesn't hold statewide office, but guy made it sound like she did. This is more misleading than OC/LA.

Most of the defence on Twitter were from left-leaning columnists enough basically along the lines of "why the rush to demonise him, it's not like he's a PHONE-HACKER or something" (translation = "he's one of us so it's okay"). Props to Matt Wells for pointing out that if you don't call people like Hari out then you don't really have the moral authority to criticise right-wing phone-hackers either.

The defenders missed the point that it wasn't mass demonisation for the most part, just a hell of a lot of pisstaking.