Johann Hari

Early life

According to Hari, he attended the John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with the Harrow School, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth-form in Finchley. Hari's website says he graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.

Career

In 2000 he was joint winner of The Times Student News Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity. After university he joined the New Statesman, where he worked between 2001 and 2003, and then wrote two columns a week for The Independent. At the 2003 Press Gazette Awards, he won Young Journalist of the Year. A play by Hari, Going Down in History, was performed at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh, and his book God Save the Queen? was published by Icon Books in 2002.

In addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El Pais, The Sydney Morning Herald and Ha'aretz, and he has reported from locations around the world such as Congo and Venezuela. He has appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show, and he was a book critic for Slate. In 2009 he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain.

In January 2012, Hari announced that he was writing a book on the war on drugs, which was subsequently published as Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

2011 scandals

In 2011, Hari was the subject of two scandals involving his conduct as a journalist. First, he was accused of plagiarism following the discovery of his repeated use of quotes from other journalists' work as if they were the product of his own interviewing. Then, having attracted critics' attention, he was found to have anonymously edited the Wikipedia pages of a number of those critics so as to present them in a negative light. Media reporting of these behaviours resulted in significant damage to Hari's reputation, and he was required to return the prestigious Orwell Prize, which he had won in 2008, and he lost his position as a columnist for The Independent.

Plagiarism

In 2011, bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group and Brian Whelan, editor of Yahoo! Ireland, garnered significant press interest after they alleged plagiarism in some of Hari's interviews, which they compared with earlier material published by other journalists and also previous written works by his interview subjects. Hari denied wrongdoing, claiming that by presenting his subjects' previous statements and writing as part of his interviews, he was not passing off someone else's thoughts as his own. He said that his use of unattributed quotes was only a clarification. Reviewing this argument, The Guardian's media law consultant focused on copyright issues.

The Guardian later reported that a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya included quotations from her book Raising my Voice in a manner that made them appear as if spoken directly to Hari. The newspaper's former editor, Peter Preston, wrote that Hari had been foolish, but not dishonest as his attackers alleged. In July 2011, Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent "pending investigation" by Andreas Whittam Smith, and he later resigned from his role as a columnist with the newspaper.

After the plagiarism allegations, the Media Standards Trust said in a statement that they recognised the potential of the complaints to damage the reputation of the Orwell Prize, which Hari had been awarded in 2008, and instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize to examine the allegations. As a result of this investigation, Hari returned the Orwell prize, though the Council of the Orwell Prize said Hari's prize "would have been vacated in any case". The Council of the Orwell Prize said they "now consider... the matter to be at an end".

Hari did not initially return the prize money of £2000. He later offered to repay the money, but Political Quarterly, responsible for paying the prize money in 2008, instead invited Hari to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell was a member. Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in installments once Hari returned to work at The Independent. However, Hari did not return to work at The Independent.

Wikipedia editing

In mid-2011, Hari was revealed to have made anonymous pejorative edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct after Nick Cohen raised concerns in The Spectator. He wrote that he had been attacked on Wikipedia by an editor named "David Rose" (which was later identified as Hari's pseudonym) following a dispute with Johann Hari, and the same editor had made similar changes to the Wikipedia pages of Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone, and Oliver Kamm, a leader writer for The Times. after they had been critical of Hari. Cohen also wrote that Hari's own Wikipedia entry had been edited by Rose "to make him seem one of the essential writers of our times". After "David Rose" was later shown to be a pseudonym of Johann Hari, Hari made a public apology for his behaviour. This apology was criticised on a blog on the website of The Economist for being insincere.

Awards

Books