Johann Hari

Johann Hari
Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British-Swiss writer and journalist who wrote for The Independent and The Huffington Post. In 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct. He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, and the effect of technology on attention spans.
Early life
Hari was born in Glasgow, Scotland to a Scottish mother and Swiss father, before his family relocated to London when he was an infant. Hari states he was physically abused in his childhood while his father was away and his mother was ill.
He attended The John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with Harrow, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth form in Finchley. Hari graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.
Hari is gay. He wrote an article claiming he had sex with men who were members of homophobic far-right and Islamist groups, stating that with drugs and "a lot of flattery" he "coaxed" a nineteen year old Muslim into "wild gay sex".
Early career
In 2000, Hari was joint winner of The Times Student News Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Cambridge student newspaper, Varsity.
After university, he joined the New Statesman, where he worked between 2001 and 2003, and then wrote two columns a week for The Independent. At the 2003 Press Gazette Awards, he won Young Journalist of the Year. A play by Hari, Going Down in History, was performed at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh, and his book God Save the Queen? was published by Icon Books in 2002.
In 2005, Hari wrote an article in The Independent entitled Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize, arguing that Harold Pinter, due to a misguided and misinformed anti-Imperialist and anti-war stance, should not have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pinter's official, authorised biographer, Michael Billington commented that Hari "dismissed (Pinter's ) Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler." In addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work also appeared in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El País, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Haaretz, and he reported from locations around the world, such as Congo and Venezuela. He appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show and was a book critic for Slate. In 2009, he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain.
2011 plagiarism, fabrication and misconduct scandal
Plagiarism
In June 2011, bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group, as well as Yahoo! Ireland editor Brian Whelan, asserted that Hari had plagiarised material published in other interviews and writings by his interview subjects. For example, a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya included quotations from her book Raising My Voice in a manner that made them appear as if spoken directly to Hari. Hari initially denied any wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not present someone else's thoughts as his own. However, he later said that his behaviour was "completely wrong" and that "when I interviewed people, I often presented things that had been said to other journalists or had been written in books as if they had been said to me, which was not truthful". Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent and in January 2012, it was announced he was leaving the newspaper.
The Media Standards Trust instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize, who had given their 2008 prize to Hari, to examine the allegations. The Council concluded that "the article contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else's story" and did not meet the standards of Orwell Prize-winning journalism. Hari returned the prize, though he did not return the prize money of £2,000. He later offered to repay the sum, but Political Quarterly, which had paid the prize money, instead invited him to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell had been a member. Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in instalments when he returned to work at The Independent, but he did not return to work there.
Fabrication
In addition to plagiarism, Hari was found to have fabricated elements of stories. In one of the stories for which he won the Orwell Prize, he reported on atrocities in the Central African Republic, claiming that French soldiers told him that "Children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help, but our orders were not to help them." However, an NGO worker who translated for Hari said that the quotation was invented and that Hari exaggerated the extent of the devastation in the CAR. In his apology after his plagiarism was exposed, Hari claimed that other staff of the NGO had supported his version of events.
In an article about military robots, Hari falsely claimed that the former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was attacked by a factory robot and was nearly killed. Hari falsely claimed that a large globe erected for the Copenhagen climate summit was "covered with corporate logos" for McDonald's and Carlsberg, with "the Coke brand ... stamped over Africa". Private Eyes Hackwatch column also suggested that he pretended to have used the drug ecstasy and misrepresented a two-week package tour in Iraq as a one-month research visit, in order to bolster support for the Iraq war by claiming that Iraqi civilians he spoke to were in favour of an invasion.
Later career
Chasing the Scream (2015)
Hari's book about drugs, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs was published in 2015. Hari also performed a TED Talk on the subject that same year. Hari claims that most addictions are functional responses to experiences and a lack of healthy supportive relationships, rather than a simple biological need for a particular substance.
Lost Connections (2018)
In January 2018, Hari's book Lost Connections, which deals with depression and anxiety, was published, with Hari citing his childhood issues, career crisis, and experiences with antidepressants and psychotherapy as fuelling his curiosity in the subject. Kirkus Reviews praised the book.
Stolen Focus (2022)
In January 2022, Hari published a book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention, claiming that elements of modern lifestyles, including social media, are "destroying our ability to concentrate". The book debuted at number seven on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending 12 February 2022.
Awards
Student News Journalist of the Year by The Times, 2000
Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards, 2003
Newspaper Journalist of the Year at Amnesty International Media Awards, 2007, for the article The Dark Side of Dubai
Author of Story of the Year at the Environmental Press Awards, 2008
Orwell Prize for political journalism, 2008 (withdrawn 2011)
Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, 2009
Newspaper Journalist of the Year at Amnesty International Media Awards, 2010, for the article Congo's tragedy: The War the World Forgot
Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, 2010
See also
Journalism scandals
Books
References
External links
Articles about Johann Hari in The Guardian
Articles for The Independent
1979 births
Living people
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Anglo-Scots
British atheists
British male journalists
British republicans
British social democrats
British drug policy reform activists
British gay writers
Journalistic scandals
Journalistic hoaxes
British LGBT journalists
English LGBT writers
People involved in plagiarism controversies
HuffPost writers and columnists
The Independent people
Journalists from London
People educated at The John Lyon School
21st-century atheists
Scottish people of Swiss descent
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia