I'm just wild about Hari

Well, not wild exactly, but I do think that Johann Hari's resignation from the Independent was the right outcome.

As I said in July of last year when the scandal broke:

He has always seemed to me more of an academic essayist than a journalist. A good example are his slightly irritating appearances on The Review Show, where new film or novel has to be compared with three others to make sense of it. 

So it was no great surprise to me that he should turn out to be more at home copying passages out of his interviewees' books than taking notes of what they say.

The sanest summing up of the affair I have read was posted by Splintered Sunrise in the same month - I included it in a Six of the Best at the time - who emphasised that Simon Kelner, the newspaper's former editor, must take a share of the blame.

It is worth reading the whole post, but this is the key passage:

Again and again, we come back to Kelner. He hired a raw young star about whom doubts had already been expressed at the New Statesman, and relentlessly promoted and protected him. 

Hari didn’t get the firm editorial hand a young journalist needs; his columns don’t seem to have been subjected to fact-checking or serious editing (comparing Hari’s columns on the Indy site with his own site, one sees that Indy editorial broke up his long paragraphs and corrected a few obvious howlers, but little else); he clearly was never given the training or mentoring he needed (and if Hari thought he didn’t need training, Kelner should have insisted) 

Hari was given plenty of resources – one hears stories of Indy interns doing mountains of photocopying that would then be couriered over to the great man (couriered, I ask you, as if he was Peter fucking Mandelson) – but didn’t give him what he really needed, a guiding hand.

Six of the Best 177

"Since World War II every single liberal President has reduced the national debt, while every single conservative one has increased it," writes Contrasting Sounds. And he has a wicked graph to prove it too.

Kathy Pollard has to deal with the bitter legacy of Suffolk's controversial former chief executive: "people still want to talk about Andrea Hill. It’s not a topic I raise with them – many are still irate about the salary, the cost of personal photo-shoots, coaching, expensive hotels, etc. This unfortunate saga seems to have cast a long shadow over Suffolk and has badly affected the reputation of a once excellent County Council, at both local and national level. We almost need a truth and reconciliation commission, so that people can get things off their chest."

A reasoned defence of online anonymity can be found on TechnoSocial.

Splintered Sunrise considers the fall of Johann Hari and finds that Simon Kelner, his editor at the Independent, must take much of the blame: "He hired a raw young star about whom doubts had already been expressed at the New Statesman, and relentlessly promoted and protected him. Hari didn’t get the firm editorial hand a young journalist needs; his columns don’t seem to have been subjected to fact-checking or serious editing ... he clearly was never given the training or mentoring he needed ... Hari was given plenty of resources ... but [Kelner] didn’t give him what he really needed, a guiding hand."

IanVisits introduces us to the owls of Wembley Park Station.

A Supreme Court judgment said that Star Wars is set in the future; a Prominent Legal Blogger scoffed; but Heresy Corner argues convincingly that the judges were right.

Johann Hari used Amazon reviews to get revenge

On Saturday I wrote about Johann Hari and Nick Cohen's revelation that those who cross Hari tend to find that their Wikipedia entries are vandalised shortly afterwards.

In that post I directed you to one on the Jack of Kent blog where this story is discussed in much greater depth. Reading that post and the informative comments on it, a fair summation of the state of play would be that the David r who has edited the Wikipedia is the same person as the David Rose about whom Hari has written in the past.

Over the years Hari has given quite specific information about Rose, whose career parallels Hari's to some extent, However, despite this information, none of the commenters on Jack of Kent has been able to prove that Rose really exists.

In my post I mentioned that somewhere at the back of my mind was the memory that Hari had once written pejorative reviews on Amazon. That is a good definition of the wisdom the years bring: you know important and  interesting things but can't quite remember them.

Fortunately, a reader has sent me a cutting from Private Eye - my readers have been very helpful today.

The first cutting is from the Eye for 25 July 2003. It runs in part:

Before Hari's literary talents were as widely known as they are today, he flexed his literary muscles by posting witty and acerbic reviews of the books of Cambridge University professor of Greek literature and culture, Simon Goldhill, on the US version of the online booksellers.

On 4 June 2000, while still studying social and political science at Kings College, Hari posted the following about the prof's Aeschylus: the Orestia: "Pompous drivvel [sic]. This Goldhill man has the prose style of a dead worm and even less warmth and charm. He clearly loves himself. Fine. Nobody else will."

Then on 23 October 2001 he posted a review of Goldhill's Being..."

Sadly, my cutting stops at this point, though Being must be Goldhill's Being Greek Under Rome.

I went to Amazon to see if Hari's reviews were still there. They are not.

But, interestingly, somebody called Anthony Barber from Northumbria has contributed equally abusive reviews of Aeschylus: the Orestia and of Goldhill's Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. He is also damning about Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, a volume which Goldhill helped to edit.

This is intriguing but does not, of course, mean that Hari is Barber.

How Goldhill upset Hari? The next issue of Private Eye discussed this very point:

The last Eye's account of reviews of Cambridge professor Simon Goldhill's books posted on Amazon.com by Johann Hari, one of Britain's most "creative" young journalists,
has caused the prof to abandon his lofty "no comment" stand.

When the Eye asked Hari, now a star columnist on the Independent, why he had posted reviews in 2000 and 2001 describing the Cambridge classics professor's learned tomes on Aeschylus and Hellenism as "pompous drivvel" [sic] and "the bowels of mediocrity", he told us that while a student at Cambridge he had formed the view that Prof Goldhill was "a complete arsehole" after disagreeing with the professor over dinner about the merits of Mo Mowlam (Hari pro, Goldhill anti).

Now Prof Goldhill tells the Eye: "I have never knowingly eaten a meal with Johann Hari. I have certainly never discussed Mo Mowlam with him; there was a disciplinary matter which followed a complaint from the staff about his unpleasantly arrogant rudeness."

Hari's recollection may have been the true one here. He may not be David Rose.

But it is a fact that those who cross Hari fare badly on Amazon as well as Wikipedia.

Later. It seems the "drivvel" review can still be found on the German Amazon site. Thanks to friends on Twitter.

Johann Hari, Nick Cohen and Wikipedia

The Diary in this week's Spectator is written by Nick Cohen. It is largely devoted to a strange experience that he had after having his book What's Left reviewed by Johann Hari in a small American journal. When the review appeared, Cohen thought it to be riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, so he sent a reply pointing out all the mistakes and it was published.

Cohen thought no more about the incident until he looked at his Wikipedia entry:

As well as learning that I was a probable alcoholic, a hypocrite and a supporter of Sarah Palin, I noticed that all reviews of my work were missing except Hari’s effort. Far from saying that he had made wild allegations and I had responded by quoting from the book, a writer working under the pseudonym ‘David r from Meth Productions’ suggested that I had made wild allegations while Hari ‘had offered quotes from Cohen which he argued backed up his claims’.

It turns out, says Cohen, that the David r had also attacked the Wikipedia entries of Cristina Odone, Francis Wheen, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson after they have been involved in disagreements with Johann Hari.

So who is this David r?

A blog post by Jack of Kent this afternoon reports some detective work, and this is being taking forward by the commenters. Suffice to say, there are remarkable similarities between the career of David r and that of Hari.

At the back of my mind I seem to recall an old Private Eye story about Hari posting highly critical reviews of the books of people who had displeased him on Amazon. Can anyone confirm it?

Johann Hari and Jeffrey Archer

It seems small potatoes now, but when Harigate broke I mentioned that Johann Hari once worked as a researcher for Jeffrey Archer. I was not able to find a source for this fact on the net, which I remembered from an old Private Eye.

The new Eye helpfully reprints the item I remembered, which turned out to date from August 2007:

A litte known fact about the 28-year-old Indie pundit Johann Hari is that he used to work for Jeffrey Archer ... assisting the great fabulist with his novel Sons of Fortune.

Very unfairly, that item went on to add:

The boy-wonder clearly learned from the master.

Peter Preston, Johann Hari and Harry Potter

Somehow Johann Hari the great journalist has passed me by. (Feel free to post links in the comments below if I have been missing a treat.) He has always seemed to me more of an academic essayist than a journalist. A good example are his slightly irritating appearances on The Review Show, where new film or novel has to be compared with three others to make sense of it.

So it was no great surprise to me that he should turn out to be more at home copying passages out of his interviewees' books than taking notes of what they say.

That said, I did not find his defence, with its implication that there is no middle position between that copying and including his subjects' every um, ah and repetition, at all convincing.

But it was a positive shock to find an experienced editor like Peter Preston repeating the same spurious argument in this morning's Observer:

the life of me, I can't work up a head of steam over Hari's occasional habit (in Indy interviews) of using a cleaned-up pre-written version of his subject's answers rather than a ... you know … more um! … rambling live response.

The explanation that Preston deploys this silly argument, as far as I can see from reading the whole column, is that Hari's delinquencies were exposed by bloggers, and Preston hates bloggers because they are not proper reporters. But, in an age where, more and more, people get their news from television or the net and rely on newspapers for comment, that distinction is very hard to maintain.

Preston also distrusts bloggers because they can be anonymous. And you have to concede that Preston has at least been consistent in his disapproval of anonymity.

In 1983 a civil servant called Sarah Tisdall (a cousin of my GP, I learnt recently) anonymously sent the Guardian documents detailing the plans for the deployment of American cruise missiles in Britain. She was later shopped to the government by the newspaper, whose editor was then one Peter Preston.

It happens that today's Observer contained another piece that explained what a real interviewer does.

In his profile of Rupert Grint - the Ron Weasley of the Harry Potter films - Tom Lamont writes:

With Grint you have to ask, and ask, and ask the same thing, to shake him from languor and from his reliance on dusty answers that have seen him through interviews for years.

That tells you a lot about modern Britain. Prize-winning political writers copy passages out of books, while probing interviewers devote their attentions to the stars of children's films.

Johann Hari wins Quote of the Day

“The number of my friends who assume that we just make up stories – even at reputable paper such as The Independent is startling.”

So wrote a youthful Johann Hari in 2003.

The quotation is taken from an old Private Eye article, but that article does not include the arresting fact that Hari began his career as a researcher for Jeffrey Archer.