Johann Hari

Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is an English writer and journalist. He has written for a number of publications including The Independent (London) and The Huffington Post and has written books on the topic of the war on drugs and the monarchy. Some of his journalism published prior to 2011 has been the subject of accusations of plagiarism, a charge which Hari denies, and he has been the subject of significant criticism for making pejorative edits to several of his critics' Wikipedia pages.

According to Hari, he attended the John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with the Harrow School, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth-form in Finchley. Hari's website says he graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.

In 2000 he 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 addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El Pais, The Sydney Morning Herald and Ha'aretz, and he has reported from locations around the world such as Congo and Venezuela. He has appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show, and he 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.

In January 2012, Hari announced that he was writing a book on the war on drugs, which was subsequently published as Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

In 2011, Johann Hari was involved in two journalistic scandals: he was accused of plagiarism because of the use of previously published quotes in place of his interviewees' recorded answers, and was found to have anonymously edited the Wikipedia pages of journalists who were critical of him, in order to damage their reputations. This resulted in significant damage to Hari's journalistic reputation and he was forced to return the Orwell Prize which he had won in 2008, and to leave his position as a columnist for The Independent.

Plagiarism

In 2011 bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group and Brian Whelan, editor of Yahoo! Ireland, alleged plagiarism by comparing Hari's interviews with previous interviews by other journalists and previous written works by his interview subjects, which garnered significant interest in the press. Hari denied these allegations, maintaining that by presenting interview subjects' previous writing as part of the interview, he was not passing off someone else's thoughts as his own, and he claimed that his use of unattributed quotes was only a clarification. Reviewing this defence, The Guardian's media law consultant focused on copyright issues.

The Guardian later reported that a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya appeared to represent quotations from her book Raising my Voice as though they were spoken directly to Hari in his interview with her. The newspaper's former editor, Peter Preston, wrote that Hari had been foolish, but not dishonest as his attackers alleged. In July 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent for two months "pending investigation" by Andreas Whittam Smith, and he later resigned from his role as a columnist with the newspaper.

After the plagiarism allegations, the Media Standards Trust announced that they recognised the potential of these allegations to damage the reputation of the Orwell Prize, which Hari had been awarded in 2008, and instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize to examine the allegations. As a result of this investigation, Hari returned the Orwell prize, a decision that the Council of the Orwell Prize agreed with.

Wikipedia editing

In mid-2011, Hari was revealed to have made anonymous pejorative edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who were publicly critical of himafter Nick Cohen raised concerns in The Spectator. He wrote that he had been attacked on Wikipedia by an editor named "David Rose" (which was later identified as Hari's pseudonym) following a dispute with Johann Hari, and the same editor had made similar changes to the Wikipedia pages of Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone, and Oliver Kamm, a leader writer for The Times. after they had been critical of Hari. Cohen also wrote that Hari's own Wikipedia entry had been edited by Rose "to make him seem one of the essential writers of our times". After "David Rose" was later shown to be a pseudonym of Johann Hari, Hari made a public apology for his behaviour. This apology was criticised on a blog on the website of The Economist for being insincere.

• Newspaper Journalist of the Year at Amnesty International Media Awards 2010
• Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism 2010
• Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, 2009
• Cultural Commentator of the Year at the Comment Awards 2009
• Author of Story of the Year at the Environmental Press Awards 2008
• The Orwell Prize for political journalism, 2008 (withdrawn 2011)
• Newspaper Journalist of the Year at Amnesty International Media Awards 2007
• Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2003
• Student News Journalist of the Year by The Times in 2000