The lumping-together is inevitable - how many up-and-coming lefty journalists are fabricating mythologies to fit an agenda? Here's the thing - the next time you read about some chirpy kid on a protest expressing fear because of "the cuts", you'll wonder if that really happened as well.

Probably the best article on the Hari issue I have read. Why couldn't he just stick to what really happened in those interviews? The idiot. Couldn't trust a word he wrote, now.

"and only "lefty" journalists would ever do such a thing... "

If you say so - I know I didn't. As has been noted elsewhere, a non-lefty journalist caught doing this would be excoriated and probably sacked - and rightly so. But this particular nincompoop remains in-post. Speaks for itself.

Are their more lefty fantasists? Maybe. Some of the florid language reported from the mouths of babe protesters in recent months seems cringingly, embarrassingly unlikely.

"...it's enough tomake me wonder whether you yourself may have an "agenda""

Damn right I do. I am sick of seeing privileged middle-class twerps inventing ideologies that attempt to make working people's lives harder, and secretly basing the whole thing on fiction and/or lies. Not only am I not concealing that position, I find it weird that anyone could *not* object to this kind of yellow journalism.

"Did it all happen just as described? Are there parts that didn't quite go like that? Can I trust what I'm reading? I want to know that's what happened, and how it happened. I want to be able to trust the author who wrote that piece I enjoyed so much, to know that all of it happened just as it was presented to me. If not then, well why bother at all?"

Yes. This.

I wrote quite a bit of the Wikipedia sub-article on the interviews issue (though I'm not responsible for the title or the references to Noam Chomsky!) and I did a lot of checking and sourcing to make sure I was getting it right - I listened to an interview with Gareth Thomas on the BBC about his coming out, as well as googling it, just to check that the quote which appears in both the Attitude interview and Hari's later interview wasn't one that Thomas was repeating again and again. And it's not. Hari's excuses that he was compensating for his interviewees speaking English as a second language, or just helping them articulate their ideas, really don't apply here - he didn't get that quote out of Gareth Thomas when he interviewed him: the editor of Attitude did.

I am an admirer of Johann Hari's writing and I want him to be a strong voice in left-wing politics. But he can't be, if we can't trust him to be an accurate reporter.

"In one sense, Hari's errors - I do think they were errors, rather than cynical or manipulative behaviour, but you may disagree - are not as serious as the casual fakery of Fleet Street."

In what sense are these things errors?

They're not slips. He didn't lose control over his computer keyboard. He didn't get his words mixed up or say something he shouldn't have done because he didn't check his facts.

He deliberately invented huge chunks of his interviews.

This isn't plagiarism - it's worse. He invented stuff. Those interviews are works of fiction. They didn't happen. They are lies.

So when Hari says something like, "And then Antonio Negri said to me..." Well, no he didn't. Hari is making it up.

The words Hari used may have been spoken to someone else - they weren't invented - and he may have accurately copied-and-pasted them but the interview itself didn't happen.

And in some cases - the Negri interview - he uses as "answers" to his questions (that were never actually asked by Hari) words that belong in another context and which were about something else - compare the stuff about memory/history and the Soviet Union.

I think it's a shame but these are pretty serious misdemeanours. You can't be taken seriously as a journalist if you're caught making things up. You just can't. Nice guy though he may be.

Hari has trashed his reputation. He will never be trusted again. It's a great shame but there it is. He is the only one to blame.

@ Kulturtrager

You're in denial.

Hari has lifted parts of other interviewers' work: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/chavez-hari-interv...

Even if that was not the case - how on earth is _rectifying_ someone's spoken words to a supposed earlier written version anything other than a denial of that person's own voice (which may well have altered in the intervening time)? For many, that's a lot worse than plagiarism.

Glad you found your b**ls and finally offered an opinion about Hari, even it was prompted by one of your colleagues. Doesn't explain why you twitter timeline suddenly went silent about it too. I suspect the reasons are as you say, an unwillingness to critique one of our own. It doesn't us any better. Makes us a hell of a lot worse than the likes of @Toadmeister et al. Glad you've finally spoken up. Nothing new added to the brave souls who jumped with commentary from the start.

Glad to see him get his comeuppance after his treatment of the Holy Father? I suppose so. But there is more going on here. Those on the Left who supported the Iraq War and then recognised the error of their ways are being taken down. As are all articulate critics of the Coalition, the Heirs to Blair.

Simon Heffer, always polite and quite fair about Gordon Brown and then about Ed Miliband, has lost the national platform from which he might have told his readers to vote Labour if only because the alternative was David Cameron. Peter Hitchens would be harder to silence, since his column is a significant factor contributing the Mail on Sunday's middle market lead. And Norman Tebbit is probably unsackable because he is Norman Tebbit. But you never know. Each of them has as good as done an Enoch. If and when they actually do it, then they might very well get what Johann Hari has got.

And I don’t mean the Orwell Prize, which Hitchens already has. Orwell is good. He is important. But he is still overrated. Not least, his depiction of Wigan is still resented in the town to this day. His famous remark about the goosestep was just plain wrong, like many of his others. And everyone should read Scott Lucas’s The Betrayal of Dissent, London: Pluto Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7453-2197-6.

However, Orwell’s patriotism, his social conservatism and his anti-Communism are vitally important in reminding the British Left that those are indispensable, and indeed definitive, aspects of our own tradition. All three, though perhaps especially the last, make him a particularly significant figure when set alongside Christopher Hill and E P Thompson in rescuing demotic culture from what Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”, even though Orwell himself was not above condescension.

So any prize in his honour should be awarded for contribution to the patriotic, socially conservative, anti-Communist Left that was the best of him, and also, therefore, to ensuring that demotic culture is taken with high seriousness. Would Johann Hari, who has at least recanted his support for the Iraq War and who wrote a very important denunciation of Dubai, win such a prize? I only ask.

His "What I learnt" open letter "apology" was breathless in it's inability to actually admit any wrong doing.

I'm amazed Mr Lebedeve has not had his letter of resignation yet.

You dare touch my sliced arm and I'll weep bitter tears into a gin and tonic glass and then fill it with metal spikes and make you drink it, Hungry Adam. I am serious. Don't dare eat my sliced arm. It still hurts. It is still bleeding.

GET AWAY FROM ME, HUNGRY ADAM. I AM WARNING YOU. I AM ON THE PHONE TO BAYONET PETE, MY OLD BUDDY FROM SCHOOL. HE IS A VIOLENT MAN AND WILL DEFEND ME! YOU HAD BETTER BEWARE!

There was a question on my blog yesterday, asking if, since Hari had made his name "pretending" (not my word) to have seduced a male neo-Nazi at a convention and a male Islamist at Finsbury Park mosque, he had ever also seduced "the pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war voice of an economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative patriotism towards the North of England, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Christendom"?

I was, and am, happy to confirm that he has never seduced this one. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has he ever "pretended" to have done so.

But, as I said on earlier post, there is more going on here. Militant atheism is fine. Extreme social liberalism is fine. Highly politicised homosexuality is fine. But to be a repentant and recovered neocon, and an articulate social democratic critic of the Coalition's neo-Blairism, is on much the same level as to be a pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war voice of an economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative patriotism towards the North of England, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Christendom. Which is to be on much the same level as a neo-Nazi or an Islamist.

Isn't it...?

Hungry Adam, BEWARE! It is I, Bayonet Pete, who has arrived to strike fear into your gluttonous heart! Keep your dirty hands off my dear friend, Still Water, or I'll stab at you with my steely bayonet until you're running with little fountains of blood! And then I'll invite my old pal, The Ravenous Squirrel, to drink up the blood! You should see his little sweet face when it's all splattered in blood! It truly is a sight to behold. You have been warned.

STAB! STAB! STAB!

*blood-drink* *blood-drink*

Don't say I didn't warn you, Hungry Adam. At least my poor slashed arm is safe now.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

"It's particularly disappointing that this is happening now, because this is the time when liberals and the left, if I can lump us all together as uneasily as that, need powerful voices, more than ever. We need the likes of Hari"

Hm. This is always where I wonder whether "we" shoot ourselves in the foot. It's the lionising of individuals like Hari, and the fact that "we're" all so obsessed with defining ourselves, that results in these massive crises of confidence every time something like this happens. When Mad Mel or Rod Liddle or Toby Young go off on one, and are found to have been spouting bollocks, the right doesn't have a collective bellyache about it. Some individuals will defend them, others won't, but it doesn't become an occasion for communal wailing and gnashing.

Though I suppose part of the reason for this may be that the kind of people the right lionise tend to pride themselves on "saying it like it is", usually with aggression/wild accusations/shitstorms of abuse etc very much part of the act. Whereas the kind of people the left lionise tend to pride themselves on sanctimony. It's hard to make political inroads by calling someone a chauvinistic twat when, in fact, that's exactly what their popularity depends on so all you're doing is helping their image. Much easier to have an impact if you can prove that the sanctimonious leftie is a hypocrite. Which, since nobody's a saint, will never be that difficult, even if most people are a bit more careful than Hari has been.

Good piece, anyway.

Well, even having just read a few of the examples its become clear that he has done far more than tidy up a few mangled sentences - he's nicked huge chunks of other people's work.

Still, at least he doesn't condone violence like the cretinous Laurie Penny.

This seems like an insidious lefties-sticking-together pact not to get a pal in trouble.

I mean that in an intellectual profile-ish sort of way, of course.

PS: David Lindsay's blog seems an excellent source of straw men. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to keep crows, or indeed any bird, away.

I don't think this is a story of carelessness or naivity. The essence of the extracts from interviews so far unearthed is something like this (generically):

"He patted my knee, lowered his voice and confided"

...followed by something said at a different time in a different place to a different person.

He is trying to describe a moment which never happened, and this is not easy. Apart from any issue of morality which one might associate with this practice, it might be of value to remind him that only the best authors of fiction are able to do this convincingly, and even they seldom manage it for an entire novel.

The pat on the knee, the lowering of the voice, the uneasy adjustment of the hair, the draught from under the doorway, the ornaments on the shelf above the fireplace. These things are inextricably connected with the dialogue. To juxtapose them, using material obtained from different places, and different times, in such a haphazard way, if it is not done extremely well, tends to alienate the senses of the reader. It creates an incongrous collage of images, all of which are illuminated from different angles. It forces the text back into the two dimensions in which it is read.

I'm afraid it's always been a bit that way for me with Johann, unappealing, synthetic journalism, every i dotted and t crossed but still something missing. So I'm not surprised that this is why he sounds the way he does.

Yes I often agree with Hari, but he has gone too far.