The Independent C/D

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.

There's a definite whiff of "Let he who is without the first stone..." about this

is that verbatim from your jesus interview I've stolen this joke off of twitter

oi you misquoted him

I haven't really engaged with this on Twitter TBH.

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

That was my impression but everyone's Twitter timeline is different so it's impossible to generalise accurately. Certainly none of the people I followed were involved in a witch hunt - most were just making hashtag jokes and a few were serious, seasoned journalists making sound objections to the fact that his blog presented this as common practice, which it isn't. There was definitely a sense from some of his defenders of "we like him and agree with what he writes, therefore everyone attacking him is a bastard." I liked Deborah Orr, who's clearly a friend of his, taking time to argue with lots of different people and conceding that he had behaved badly while saying (rightly IMO) that it was naivete rather than malice.

think naivete is being kind, it's arrogance.

naïveté is what i initially put it down to...before i realised it's habitual for him

f you don't call people like Hari out then you don't really have the moral authority to criticise right-wing phone-hackers either.

And if you don't call out people like Littlejohn then you don't really have the moral authority to criticise left-wing..er..whatever you want to call him.

There was a lot of pisstaking but Guido and his sycophants smell blood.

He's a naïveté habitué. Think D.Orr was saying it was all a while ago when he was young and inexperienced (the plagriaism not the sleeping with a 'neo-Nazi')

Also if he's reasonably consistently not getting good enough quotes in interviews then maybe he's not a very good interviewer and the Independent shoud, y'know, send someone else.

He started very young and without formal journalistic training and, in my experience, editors never discuss ethics of interviewing because they assume it's a given, so I can easily see how someone could keep bending and bending the boundaries while thinking, "Hey, nobody's getting hurt." If you develop a bad habit in your writing early on it can stick for years until an editor or a fellow writer points it out. If he didn't think it was wrong in 2003, and nobody said otherwise, why would he think it was wrong in 2011?

Even being generous to him, though, where I think he really crossed the line was by taking quotes solicited by other interviewers - even now he's falsely claiming that he only took bits from the interviewee's own prose. The daft thing is that I bet he did have decent quotes he'd got himself but got obsessed with this idea that every quote had to be perfect. Maybe that happens if you're interviewing Negri - I never had that impetus when I was interviewing Xzibit.

He got big gigs out of university. There are more than enough people (nearly all women) who started in music press or whatever as teenagers who are around 35 now and did not have training on a journalism course either*. I'm pretty sure the women I'm thinking of are rigorous because of early angst about not being treated like a child in an office, and the sense that one has to be ethically correct on the page as proof that you can run with the adults and do just as well, if not better there, was probably motivating.

*one or two went to City after their careers were well-established and now work in news journalism.

lack of formal training is a good point - i've never had any either and while i know i can get good quotes i still have no idea how one is "meant" to do an interview - while you can get guidance from editors and others with your writing, it's not like you ever get to sit in on a top interviewer actually doing the thing, or get assessed by anyone yourself. having said that i don't think it's ever crossed my mind to pass quotes from other interviews off as my own - as dorian says the test of a good interviewer isn't just in the writing, it's in the ability to extract those quotes in the first place.

what makes it particularly egregious for me isn't just how habitual it seems but how he seems to lift CHUNKS of quote at a time, not just a turn of phrase here or a sentence there.

this is the last time i felt the need to go to a quote someone else had got previously, when i interviewed the-dream in 2009:

That said, he has been quick to stick up for Milian – to whom he announces his engagement a few weeks after the interview – against such accusations. With her own singing career stalled since her departure from Def Jam in 2006, hooking up with Nash, who will produce her fourth album Elope, and release it on his own Radio Killa imprint, has been a professional as well as personal boon – and inevitably, the claws have come out. In an interview with the Rap Radar website, Nash sprung to Milian’s defence in typically humorous fashion: “To clear this up, ‘Oh, she fuckin’ for tracks’ and this shit, I be like…It’s a recession, ain’t nobody got to fuck for tracks. We basically giving them away. When I started to really want to build my label, I went looking for her. She’s talented and a good person.”

a) credited
b) pretty funny turn of phrase
c) while i was interviewing him, christina milian was draped over his lap, so it's not like he'd have said anything like that to me

But surely it would just seem counterintuitive for a journalist to think that passing off a quote from another interview as part of your own conversation was an okay thing to do? I mean, why would anyone think that?

I'm separating this from people who do that knowing full well it's wrong but that they can get away with it, but I'm not sure I believe this naivete line.

Well I've never met the guy so I don't know, and it's totally counterintuitive to me, although appropriating uncredited old material is commonplace in music mag "making of" features where the artist is either dead or won't talk to you. I once filed one with all the credits in place and the subs removed them. Someone could justifiably claim to be misled by that, I guess. What's crazy is Hari HAD the access, he HAD roughly the right quotes, but he cheated in order to make them a little bit better.

The right and wrong is clear-cut to me. I'm interested in the psychology behind it. I like to think the best of people but the more examples I read (like the Chavez one in the NS, where he's lifted a quote from a New Yorker profile) the less sympathetic I become.

I worked on staff at the Statesman some time before Hari was there, straight out of university, but I was still in touch with the people there. And they complained about this bumptious kid who wouldn't listen to advice, tried to tell production journalists – whom he saw as inferior – what to do, and treated his time there as some kind of personal fiefdom. That sounds like arrogance rather than naïvete to me. And after his years on a paper, I don't think naivete would be an acceptable excuse. He's been on national papers longer than me; I never went to journalism school either; and if I tried blaming a professional error on naïvete I'd get very short shrift indeed.

^^^I hadn't heard anything like this before but if so... sigh. JH wouldn't be in a tight spot if he'd cited the writing as the subject's and then gone on to quote the subject affirming it in person.

Music mags covering the 'making of' usually attribute the old quote to the interviewer, if it enhances the brand. If not, or the writer left under a cloud, it's 'told the NME' or 'said Bono in 1992'.

If you're doing a big profile, part of that is gathering a consensus on your subject and attributing that. It lays out the reasons why they are significant and gives that significance context, because 'blah blah blah' said X in Time Magazine is not like 'blah blah blah' said X in Pitchfork. It's a gauge of newsworthiness and it comes in damn handy in 3000/w features where you're contrasting all of it with the iteration of the subject that you're meeting on the day.