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Diary

9 July 2011

I learned that Johann Hari was a journalist who was better at attention-seeking than truth-telling when a small American journal asked me to reply to his review of What’s Left, a book of mine on the dark forces in liberal-left politics. I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to disagree — but that he had attacked a book I had not written. He pretended that I believed the West had been right to support Saddam Hussein while he was gassing the Kurds when I had said the opposite. He made up stories about my parents, good people he had never met, to show me in a bad light. Every second paragraph contained a howler. Well, I thought, get a book wrong and the text will confound you. I typed out the passages that proved that he was at best an incompetent reviewer and filed my reply. ‘Get out of that,’ I muttered as I hit the send button.

Ithought no more about it until I looked at my entry on Wikipedia. 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’. The fearsome honour code by which hacks abide insists that no journalist can sue for libel — if you give it, you must take it. I bowed to its stern injunctions while wishing that my colleagues would grant me a release just this once so that I might relieve Jimmy Wales of a part of his fortune.

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Andrew Dyer

July 8th, 2011 7:31pm Report this comment

Very nicely done.

I notice they've not sacked him:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-would-you-trust-a-management-consultant-with-the-worlds-rainforests-2308686.html

Fancy basing a the article on the concept of trust, what chutzpa.

James

July 9th, 2011 12:41am Report this comment

Yeah - Hari's a clint. And an ignorant one at that. His dirty little brand of journalism has been exposed as mendacious tosh. Why is he still paid for writing garbage? Tosser.

Matt

July 9th, 2011 11:11am Report this comment

Interesting info on the identity of "David R". Claims to be a sub at the Indy and a friend of Hari.:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Talk:Johann_Hari

Jono

July 9th, 2011 3:11pm Report this comment

It was obvious even before his plagiarism was exposed that Hari is a despicable and spiteful creep, fond of labelling as "racist" anyone whom he disagrees.

Jerry Hayes

July 9th, 2011 3:23pm Report this comment

David r modified (wiped pretty clean) his wiki entry at 11.21 am today

Orwell Prize

July 10th, 2011 3:58pm Report this comment

It's all cached here https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=David+r+from+meth+productions

DS

July 11th, 2011 1:47pm Report this comment

Interesting. But can anyone explain the point of the guinea pig story? I don't get it.

Rolf

July 13th, 2011 7:25am Report this comment

Hari's abuse of wikipedia is unsurprising. Many minor celebrities and writers lovingly groom their entries to make themselves appear important. The wikipedia project -- except as a grab bag of pop-culture trivia -- is fatally flawed.

Andy Gill

July 13th, 2011 3:55pm Report this comment

Hari is finally getting what he deserves for a career built on shoddy and unethical journalism.

Hopefully, his Orwell prize will now be withdrawn. He is thoroughly discredited and should be expelled from the NUJ.

Estel

July 14th, 2011 5:56pm Report this comment

Surely you could have changed the Wikipedia page? There are careful protocols for changing editing. If you provided exact references as you did to the journalist, the edits would have had to go on. Bit masochistic to just leave it?

Nick

July 31st, 2011 9:13pm Report this comment

Thanks for posting this. Hari's behaviour is far beyond suspicious at this point. How disappointing.

And for the person that thinks Wikipedia is a repository of pop trivia, you should probably be told that it is an encyclopaedia and therefore has reliable info on many scientific topics, places from small villages to big cities worldwide, languages, history, mythology and numerous other topics that are incredibly useful to many people every day, especially us writers. If you think an encyclopaedia exists to provide super accurate bios of minor contemporary/living media figures, you may be just the teensiest bit off the mark.

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