Harigate- Part 2 of 3- Harigate Becomes Indygate

Johann Hari's inventiveness when it comes to reporting has been common knowledge for many years. See here for many examples. However in his faux-apology he still refuses to accept that he lied in his journalism. In particular he stands by the reporting from the Central African Republic that won him an Orwell Prize:

After it emerged that I had done this, some defenders of the powerful people I had taken on over the years for their wrongdoing saw an opportunity to try to discredit what I had written about them. Amid legitimate criticism of what I had done wrong, there were lots of untrue statements, but I’m hardly in a position to complain that some people saw it as an opportunity to take a free kick. 

In 2007, I travelled through the Central African Republic to report on the fact the French government had been bombing the country. An anonymous claim was made that I had exaggerated the extent of the French bombing, and that I had fabricated a quote from a French soldier on the ground. Two representatives of the NGO that I travelled with came forward to The Independent’s investigation into my journalism and they said my description of the bombing damage was entirely accurate, and that they have photographs of it. They also explained that they witnessed me speaking to several French soldiers when the person making these charges was otherwise occupied. 

The collosal self regard shines through- "defenders of the powerful people I had taken on over the years for their wrongdoing saw an opportunity to try to discredit what I had written about them".

As he is sticking to this story and the Independent have not fired him it must be assumed that they believe his denial. Which is to say they believe an absolutely extraordinary story- that African children were approaching French soldiers carrying the severed heads of their parents screaming for help- despite the fact that an aid worker who was there flatly refutes his claims.

Given that Hari's use of deceit has been proven- with anonymous libel on Wikipedia and misrepresenting other people's interview quotes as his own work- and he has had questions raised over his honesty since he was a student why would the Independent give him the benefit of the doubt over this wild tale? Is the aid worker who went to Private Eye with her complaint one of the shadowy "defenders of powerful people"?

Hari says that two other aid workers backed him up. However as it has already been established that they had become personal friends of his and he has used friends of his to support his lies before- by posing as the real life David Rose and Niko- that surely cannot carry any weight. It seems pretty unlikely that given the brazenness of the lies Hari admits to that his foreign reporting would be clean, as that is an area notoriously easy to fake.

It is quite clear that from the word go the Independent had no interest in investigating what Hari did. The absurd delay in investigating him, the fact that they did not speak to any of the other journalists who criticised him and the insistence in keeping the results of their investigation secret demonstrate this. 

The Independent's cover up means that they can simply not be trusted to report on any subject as they have made it clear that they do not respect their readers enough to tell them the truth.

Shock As Renowned Liar Found To Have Made Things Up.

Johann Hari has been caught stealing quotes made by interviewees with other journalists and attributing it as his own work.

It has been clear for years that Johann Hari is a liar, and that he makes things up. Even if you don't include claims that seem preposterous but can't actually be disproved the evidence is overwhelming.

Private Eye discovered Hari's propensity to lie back in 2003:

Not that startling, surely, especially if they are regular readers of Johann Hari. He began his career as the voice of yoof in July 2001, just after finishing his university finals, by boasting about his drug habit to the readers of the New Statesman. “Another Cambridge May Week has rolled around,” he wrote, “and I, like half of Cambridge, celebrated with a few tabs of Ecstasy and the odd line of coke.”

Fleet Street editors were thrilled: the Sindie reprinted his piece, and a few months later the London Evening Standard invited him to do an encore. Hari obliged by defending “the Ecstasy I know and love” against the tut-tutting of the Home Secretary. “Clearly, David Blunket needs to be informed of the basic facts about one of Britain’s most popular drugs,” he raved. “If he fancies tying one, I’ll be happy to take him to a decent club. But in the meantime, I’ll try to explain why so many of use the drug weekly.” He duly went on to describe the sensation of being “loved up” and “at one.”

In fact, however, the young rascal had never taken Ecstasy: before writing his lyrical account he had to phone a friend and ask what it felt like! And now, less than two years later, he has already forgotten his brief incarnation as an e-fiend. “Ecstasy defined the generation of my older siblings, not mine,” he wrote in the Indie two weeks ago. “Ecstasy is out.”

No matter: it served its purpose, and Hari was on a roll. A couple of weeks after his original ecstasy article he went to Genoa for the G8 summit and sent a vivid dispatch to the New Statesman about the death of anti-globalisation protester Carlo Giuliani. “On Friday, before the real business of the summit began, the police shot him twice in the head and then ran him over,” he reported. “They killed him, even though he carried no weapon other than a fire extinguisher. When I saw the scene, I couldn’t believe so much blood had poured from just one body.” Yet, as several witnesses can attest, Hari wasn’t there, having hailed a taxi to escape the scene some time before Giuliani was killed.

Now that he’s a full-fledged pundit, Hari has been pontificating in the Indie and on Newsnight about his support for a war against Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis want to be bombed, he says, even if more than 100,000 of them die: he knows, because he’s been there and talked to them. “Last October, I spent a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein,” he wrote on 10 January. “Most of the Iraqi people I encountered…. Would hug me and offer coded support.”

Actually, Hari spent two weeks in Iraq as a holidaymaker, on a package tour visiting ancient archaeological sites. He wrote about the trip in the Guardian on 3 December last year. In that article, however, he complained that it was “very difficult to get Iraqis to express their feelings… I blundered about asking fairly direct political questions, which caused people to recoil in horror… Many people asked quite genuinely ‘why your government hates the Arab world’.” He also met many “dignified, stoical Iraqis” and “doe-eyed children” who complained about western sanctions.

The only person who eventually offered “coded support” was an old man in a souk who had visited London in the 1970s. “After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, ‘I admire British democracy and freedom.’ He held my gaze. ’I very much admire them.’ He added, ’We do not know what is coming. The news we receive here is… unclear.’”

And, er, that’s it. Yet in an Indie column on 15 February, Hari claimed that people in Iraq asked him: “When will you come to free us? When will we be able to live again?” Since these pleas from Iraqis yearning for the bombers to arrive must surely have struck him as newsworthy, why didn’t he mention them in his original Guardian feature?

Answer comes there none. The only question troubling this journalistic wunderkind at the moment is why on earth British newspaper readers suspect that hacks “just make up stories.”

Since 2003 he has carried on lying- inventing an interview with a jihadist who had slashed the throats of 4 female Israeli soldiers (no such incident has ever happened). He was also caught out claiming to have interviewed a former Iraqi human shield volunteer who had seen the light, which was equally bogus.

Johann Hari has been making things up for over a decade and yet he remains a national newspaper columnist and a regular talking head on various BBC programmes. Maybe this latest scandal will sink him but it probably won't and even if it does his presence will be filled with another fabulist like Laurie Penny or someone like that.

Winston Who?

PR disguised as news, designed to elicit loud tuts of dismay from various people concerned about the teaching of British history, but really giving much needed publicity for the client:

By 2090 future generations will no longer recognise Winston Churchill, new research revealed today.

It seems hard to believe amid the current political storm, but research commissioned by the Royal Mint found that, in 80 years' time, people will not recognise the former Prime Minister.

As part of the survey, carried out to mark this week's 70th anniversary of Churchill's prime ministerial tenure, more than 1,136 people were asked to identify three prominent 20th century PMs including Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

One in five (19%) adults failed to name Churchill, with the figure rising to 32% of 25 to 34-year-olds and 44% of those aged 16 to 24.

The survey doesn't really explain how the level of public recognition can be extrapolated into the future (they give a method but is plainly absurd), because the purpose of the survey isn't to elicit information but to get the client in the news. Reading to the end of the article reveals what is actually going on:

Kevin Clancy, head of Historical Services at the Royal Mint, added: "It's shocking that one of our greatest statesmen runs the risk of potentially being forgotten.

"Churchill remains an historical colossus and is arguably one of the nation's greatest Britons.

"It's fundamentally important that we commemorate our heritage for future generations to celebrate, and to mark the 70 years that have passed since he was Prime Minister we're immensely proud to have designed a new £5 coin featuring an iconic Churchillian image, to help his memory live on."

What you have something to sell, I would never have guessed.

Why do newspapers report this crap as news?

Guest Post: Johann Hari Reports From Mordor.

Editors note: It's been a while since I had a guest post, neither Gordon Brown nor Liam Donaldson have agreed to come back here, so my standards may have slipped, I did try to fact check the report but was threatened with a libel writ if I implied that it may not be entirely accurate.


The Lies You've Been Told About Mordor.

The shadow looming over Middle Earth – the shadow of Sauron– furrows his big, non corporeal brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die. “I will never forget – in the early hours, I said goodbye to my ringwraiths. I kissed them goodbye and blessed them.” He knew in his gut he was not going to survive that long, bloody day in the third age, when he and his allies finally decided to stage a revolution against the hated Elvish order. However he survived and since that day he has felt blessed.

Now the Middle Earth armies are once again beating the drums of war against Sauron and his people. They say he is a tyrant but tell that to Gogdush, a 14 year old Orc whose life has been transformed Sauron’s social housing policies. He sobs as he shares his recollection of life before Sauron over dinner- “Before Sauron we were marginalised and kept from enjoying our share of the resources of Middle Earth, we weren’t even able to get food”. He hands me some of the casserole he heats on a small stove whose warm glow is easily outshone by the radiance of my self righteousness, I chew into the tender yet hard to identify meat, by the look of the small yet furry primate foot it isn’t anything I’ve tasted before. “It’s a native delicacy, which we weren’t allowed to touch before Sauron”, Gogdush tells me.

Yet Middle Earth leaders frequently describe Sauron as being a source of pure evil intent on dominating the world. “This is nonsense” Sauron says angrily, "just because we are using our natural resources to construct giant towers that overshadow the entire planet and to raise Orcish armies that doesn’t mean that we are the bad guys”. He’s right of course, the tower building programme is actually one of Sauron’s great success programmes, the towers are capable of sustaining more people than the sprawling individualistic burrows that dominate the Shire, and have a much lower environmental impact.

The second lie told about Sauron’s Mordor is that it is a place of misery and joylessness. In fact it has a flourishing arts and crafts scene, even Sauron himself likes to make jewellery! However I’m here to ask probing questions, such as his record on gay rights:

“Orcs are soulless and sexless creatures who are not borne of the fruit of love but raised asexually from the barren earth of Mordor, since they are neither male nor female homosexuality is a conceptual impossibility, very much like Independent journalists in that sense.”

Quite, it goes without saying that neither Rohan or the Shire have achieved such perfect gender balance yet. But what about Mordor’s labour laws, under which many citizens have to work up to 60 hours a week?

“Look we are a developing country, some of our labour laws need improving and who is likely to accomplish that, me or a Gandalfian puppet?”

Indeed and it is true that labour relations have greatly improved since Sauron returned from his 3000 year exile.

No Mordor is not perfect, yes the relationship between Sauron and Saruman- who was of course backed by the West until he switched sides, is troubling but as I sit in the middle of an Orc camp surrounded by hideous inhuman creatures, I ask myself who are we to condemn these people and the leaders striving to improve their situation?

PR Stunts As News

This is terrible:

For the warring couples in your life, it could be the perfect gift this Christmas - a divorce gift voucher.

They have been put on sale for the first time in this country by Vanessa Lloyd Platt, who runs her own legal practice and is renowned for representing high profile clients and celebrities such as Anne Diamond and Les Dennis.

I'm not referring to the" divorce vouchers" themselves, but to the fact that this is a story. Why do newspapers insist on reporting tacky public relations stunts as news?

Advertising Disguised As News.

On the ITV news this evening there was a report about the closure of Woolworths and the impending loss of jobs. This is a pretty depressing story and of tremendous importance to thousands of Woolworths employees. It is therefore extremely tacky to use the news report to plug the Christmas single by the latest winner of ITV's 'X-Factor' by explaining that it was one of the items being sold by the chain and then cutting to a clip of her murdering 'Hallelujah'.