The depressing tale of Johann Hari

By Bagehot

READERS of the Independent were in for a surprise this morning: a lengthy apology from that newspaper's star columnist Johann Hari, admitting to plagiarism and the online harrassment of rival journalists (via pseudonymous assaults on their Wikipedia entries), and announcing that he was off to take a course of journalism training at his own expense.

Allegations of quote-stealing and factual embellishment by Mr Hari have been swirling for months, at first in the blogosphere and then in the mainstream media. I have not posted about the whole sorry saga to date because—at the end of the day—a hack is only a hack, and the press already spends too much time talking and thinking about itself.

But something about the weasel wording of Mr Hari's apology today sticks in the craw. I have also been depressed to see a chorus of well-known journalists leap to Mr Hari's defence, arguing that what he did was silly or foolish, but is not really his fault. One senior colleague of his told me recently that the real problem was that Mr Hari had never gone to journalism school or worked on a newsdesk, but had jumped straight to a career as a columnist, interviewer and foreign correspondent. Mr Hari adopts this own line for himself now, writing today how he rose very quickly in journalism straight from university.

The key passage from the apology runs:

I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don't translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

But I was wrong. An interview isn't an X-ray of a person's finest thoughts. It's a report of an encounter. If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write “she has said,” instead of “she says”. You write “as she told the New York Times” or “as she says in her book”, instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere. If I had asked the many experienced colleagues I have here at The Independent – who have always been very generous with their time – they would have told me that, and they would have explained just how wrong I was. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask

Read it quickly, and it sounds terrifically contrite. Read it carefully, and Mr Hari is actually blaming his interviewees for their lack of verbal polish. It is a nifty defence: there he was, travelling the world to meet all these famous and brilliant people, conducting all these excellent interviews, only to find, on returning to his hotel room to transcribes his tapes, that time and again his subjects had garbled their lines.

I do not recognise the phenomenon Mr Hari is describing. Some interviews go well, others less well. But in the midst of each conversation, as I write my notes, I am aware (sometimes heart-sinkingly aware) whether my subjects are saying interesting things or not. I also know something else: if you go to interview someone who is famous or important or witty or wise (as opposed to a member of the public swept up in a news event) and they say only boring or incoherent things, it is mostly your fault.

This is what baffles me about those colleagues leaping to Mr Hari's defence. It is as if they imagine conducting an interview is mostly an act of stenography: you find someone interesting, ask them things, and then write down what they say. It is not stenography. Perhaps 80% of the knack of interviewing involves the ability to get people to open up and say striking things. When a subject is bored, or tired, or hostile your job is to charm or provoke them. It can be hard work. Surprisingly often, it can feel like (non-sexual) flirtation.

If you come away with gems, you know it, and may call your editor to say: "It went really well, he gave me some really great quotes." If you come away with a notebook full of mush, you are not allowed to go to another interview conducted by someone else who was given better quotes and take them without attribution. If you do, that is stealing.

Lack of journalism school is no excuse. As it happens, I did not go to journalism school, went straight to my first newspaper from university and became a (very lowly) foreign correspondent fairly early on in my career. I never asked more experienced colleagues whether it was allowed to steal quotes after messing up an interview, because (and I am letting you into trade secrets here) every journalist knows this.

Mr Hari ends his column with a pledge:

although it has been a really painful process and will surely continue to be for some time, I think in the end I'll be grateful my flaws have also been dragged into the light in this way. I would like to apologise again to my readers, my colleagues and the people hurt by my actions. I know that some of you have lost faith in my work. I will do everything I can now to regain it. I hope, after a period of retraining, you will give me the chance

Ah, so it's a teachable moment, worthy of a Disney television movie. Except that this whole sorry saga is not about someone who missed the ethics course at journalism college.

I feel most confident talking about Mr Hari's work as a foreign reporter: that is the form of journalism I know best.

One of the things you find out fast as a foreign correspondent, especially reporting from the developing world, is that there is very little to stop you making things up, except your own conscience. Out in a Chinese field, interviewing a peasant who has had his land stolen, or out in an Afghan refugee camp speaking to victims of Taliban brutality, it soon becomes obvious that if you embellish and improve quotes, nobody is going to find out. Chinese peasants and Afghan refugees are not going to read your work, and are not going to shop you to your editors.

As it happens, and you are going to have to take this on trust I fear, I am a fantastic prig and Puritan on this subject, and fanatical about getting quotes straight and reporting only what I have seen, or if I am quoting what a local or a photographer or a wire agency saw, saying so. That is not because I am a saint. It is more about managing the existential angst of being a reporter a long way away from home: once you start making things up a bit, you might as well start making it all up and file without even getting on a plane. And then you quickly feel the ground vanishing beneath your feet: if you are inventing things, why be a journalist at all?

I know some foreign correspondents who have gone down that route, and have had priggish arguments with some of them. Plagiarists, liars, make-it-up merchants, they all exist. The war correspondent solemnly announcing to television viewers that he is on the front line, when he is 20 miles from the fighting and his colleagues are mocking him just out of shot. The foreign correspondent who wrote a vivid portrayal of an Asian dog meat restaurant, complete with descriptions of brutal dog-killing, callous chefs and hungry punters, without actually visiting the country in question, and who—when I challenged him—told me "oh that, it was a bit of imagineering". The gentler souls who use foreign languages to cut corners. (I once knew a correspondent with the amazing gift of diving into a Chinese crowd and coming out, 30 seconds later, with the perfect quote, despite pretty limited Mandarin. I never had the heart to say: great quote, now tell me how you say that in Chinese.)

So here is my take on Mr Hari. On reporting trips on the other side of the world, far from the watchful gaze of his editors, he plagiarised and embellished quotes (though he still denies accusations of inventing some of his most dramatic facts). Now he is admitting to wrong-doing and apologising, but only after getting caught, years later.

I have met too many journalists like that, and their flaw was not one of training. At the risk of being pompous, it was one of character. The Independent's editor, Chris Blackhurst, announces today that there is "no doubting [Mr Hari's] talent as a columnist and we are hoping to see him back in the not too distant future."

What does that say about British journalism?