During a journalistic scandal, the malefactor's professional fellows have two possible courses of action. One is to enjoy gleefully and sanctimoniously the humbling of another (especially on another newspaper); the other is to examine their own methods and conscience.
This week's row over the admission by the Independent's Johann Hari that he interpolated passages from interviewees' books in passages presented as conversation has induced the second reaction in me. I've conducted thousands of interviews for newspapers, radio and TV and the Hari fuss – which seems to me far more complicated than his online detractors have allowed – raises fascinating ethical questions about what it means to present a conversation accurately.
The initial charge against the journalist was that he had committed a variety of plagiarism, the crime which has become so easy to suspect and prosecute since the internet created a global, cross-checkable database of print. Words coming out of the mouths of Hari's subjects were found to exist identically in their books and, in another case, in a previous interview. The writer admits that he tacked on these extant paragraphs to the chats he was writing up.
Clearly, Hari's method was unorthodox and should not be taught in journalism school. It also suggests that he is perhaps happier as a commentator than an interviewer: had his tape recorder, shorthand or questions been better, he might have required less help from the spirit of the bookshelf. But the calls for him to be stripped of his job and his awards – as happened to various American journalists who fictionalised entire stories and interviews – are inappropriately draconian. I'm frequently grateful that I neither blog nor tweet as the degree of moral purity apparently achieved by practitioners in these media seems dauntingly unreachable.
Plagiarism is passing someone else's words off as your own; Hari was passing off the words of another person as their own. This seems a small sin and the technique that exposed him – searching for the earlier existence in print of words included in an interview – would bring a lot of questioners to trial. This is a form in which absolute linguistic originality is an elusive quarry.
In my experience, many interviewees – politicians and writers, especially – eerily reproduce identical answers across a range of media conversations. Indeed, publishers now give formal training in learning short, grabby and product-placing paragraphs to be toured unchanged around the various studios. Many authors also, if asked what they think about Pope John XXIII or West Indian cricket, will speak verbatim paragraphs they have written on these subjects. Martin Amis, for example, routinely delivers key thematic sentences from his latest books during conversations to promote them.
This can be seen as laziness – or, at some level, cheating the audience – but why would a good writer or thinker not prefer to preserve for ever opinions lengthily distilled in private than to ad-lib attitudes in public? The Hari tactic merely extends this courtesy to speakers who, for whatever reason, have failed to express themselves with the clarity of which they were elsewhere capable. In essence, he has been too kind to his interviewees, which is a journalistic failing but a small one in comparison to the numerous media interviews that choose to cruelly distort what was actually said in the interest of news value, malice or political purchase.
Strikingly, the interviewees we are invited to see as Hari's victims never complained and this is possibly because they so enjoyed the novelty of being quoted accurately. There are numerous newspaper interviewees who recognise neither the phrasing nor imputation of things they are supposed to have said.
Even beyond deliberate invention or distortion, my guess is that the quotations in most print interviews would struggle to survive comparison with an exact transcript of the reporter's tape recording. Several very fine Fleet Street inquisitors have relied on what might be called threshold ambiguity: doubt about whether something said at the door or while making tea can be placed on the record.
In the next stage of falsification, hesitations and stumbles and false starts are routinely excised, unless they reveal psychologically significant uncertainty on a particular subject. If an actor says "this one has even more stunts than that one", then it is clearer to insert the names of the two movies being mentioned and may perhaps be easier to read if the clarifying words are simply substituted rather than, as strict protocol demands, inserted in square brackets afterwards.
An area that proves surprisingly fraught ethically is an interviewee's vocabulary and grammar. If a speaker of lesser education or articulacy says "I were frightened" or "we was relieved" – or, malapropistically, refers to the "penile" rather than "penal" system – a writer has to decide whether to play the invisible English teacher or to follow a traditional journalistic practice of following misspeakings with the patronising suffix "[sic]".
My view on this is that Alan Sugar's fouls against Fowler's are revealing of his personality – he's old enough and bright enough to have switched to the Queen's English if he wanted to – and so his answers should be set down exactly. However, a 17-year-old footballer or a parent whose child has just been murdered doesn't deserve to be offered up for the tut-tutting of the more rigorously schooled and so can be gently corrected.
So almost all print interviews involve some degree of cleaning-up. Hari, admittedly, opted for a sort of industrial deep-cleaning and even getting the builders in, but his actions would only become unsurvivable if he had not actually met his subjects or had blurred their responses with his own words.
The truth is that most interviews in most media are merely an approximation of the encounter. In the case of broadcasting, a live conversation is as verbatim as it gets but, once a talk is recorded and edited, the transmitted version becomes volatile in meaning. Although television has recently introduced the screen-wipe, where one image folds into another, as a version of the dotted ellipsis in print (to show that an answer has been cut) there are still strategies – such as cutting away to film or to a "noddy" of the questioner – that permit several speeches to be merged into one or a soundbite to be pulled from a careful, nuanced answer. And radio listeners need extremely good ears to detect where edits have been made.
Media scandals often produce an extreme over-correction and so there may now be pressure, in newspapers and elsewhere, for every um and pause to be reported. But, being exposed daily to the raw form of such conversations, I would strongly advise against such scrupulous accuracy. We must always be alert to cases of people being made to say things they wouldn't or haven't but that hasn't happened in this case. And, if you really want people saying unthinkingly and without editing the first dumb thing that comes into their mouth then, as the Hari case again proves, such discourse is widely available in chatrooms and on Twitter.