Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British writer and journalist. Until 2011, Hari wrote for The Independent, among other outlets, before resigning 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.[1][2] He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, the effect of technology on attention span, and anti-obesity medication, which have attracted criticism for inaccuracies and misrepresentation.
Hari was born in Glasgow, Scotland to a Scottish mother and Swiss father,[1] before his family relocated to London when he was an infant.[3] His father was a bus driver, and mother was a nurse. Later on in life, his mother worked in shelters for survivors of domestic violence.[4] Hari states he was physically abused in his childhood while his father was away and his mother was ill.[5]
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.[8] 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.[8]
2011 plagiarism, fabrication and misconduct scandal
Plagiarism
In June 2011, bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group, as well as Yahoo! Ireland editor Brian Whelan, discovered that Hari had plagiarised material published in other interviews and writings by his interview subjects.[11][12] 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.[13] A piece entitled "How Multiculturalism Is Betraying Women" which Hari submitted when entering the Orwell Prize was plagiarised from Der Spiegel.[14]
Hari initially denied any wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not present someone else's thoughts as his own.[15][16] 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."[17] Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent[18][2] and in January 2012 it was announced that he was leaving the newspaper.[19]
The Media Standards Trust instructed the council of the Orwell Prize, who had given their 2008 prize to Hari, to examine the allegations.[20][21] 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.[22][23] Hari returned the prize,[24] though he did not return the prize money of £2,000.[25] 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 installments when he returned to work at The Independent, but he did not return to work there.[26]
Fabrication and misrepresentation
As early as 2000, Hari was criticised by Ben Elton in the letters page of Varsity for inaccuracies including stating that only Jews can be Israeli citizens.[27] In addition to plagiarism, Hari was found to have fabricated elements of stories.[28] In one of the stories for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize, he reported on atrocities in the Central African Republic, stating 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.[29][30] In his apology after his plagiarism was exposed, Hari said that other staff of the NGO had supported his version of events.[31][32]
In a 2010 article about military robots, Hari falsely claimed that former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi was attacked by a factory robot and was nearly killed.[33][34][14] 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."[14]Private Eye's 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 stating that Iraqi civilians he spoke to were in favour of an invasion, although in an earlier article[35] he had given a conflicting account stating that Iraqis were reticent about their opinions.[36]
While Hari was working at the New Statesman, the magazine's deputy editor, Cristina Odone, doubted the authenticity of quotations in a story he wrote. When she asked to see his notebooks, he said that he had lost them. After discovering that Hari had lost a position at the Cambridge student newspaper for allegedly unethical behaviour, Odone went to the magazine's editor, Peter Wilby, but without result. Odone subsequently found that her Wikipedia entry had been altered by Hari, using his sock puppet account of "David Rose", to falsely accuse her of homophobia and anti-Semitism.[14]
In July 2011, Cohen wrote about the suspicious Wikipedia editing in The Spectator,[38] prompting the New Statesman journalist David Allen Green to compile evidence that Hari used the fake identity "David Rose" to pretend to be an editor who was qualified in environmental science.[40] This led to an investigation by the Wikipedia community and "David Rose" was blocked from Wikipedia.[40] Hari published an apology in The Independent, admitting that he had been "David Rose" and writing: "I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you. I apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally."[41]
Use of libel law to suppress criticism
Hari used threats of suing for libel to prevent critics revealing his misrepresentations.[42] After British bloggers criticised his critique of Nick Cohen's What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way for factual and interpretive errors, Hari used libel law against a blogger who wrote that "a reputation for making things up should spell career death", leading to the blogger removing the post in question.[37]
Hari's 2015 book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs critiques the global prohibition of illicit narcotics.[43][44] Hari argued 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.[45][non-primary source needed]
Due to the previous scandals, Hari put the audio of some interviews conducted for Chasing the Scream online. Writer Jeremy Duns criticised instances where quotes were inaccurately transcribed or misrepresented, stating that out of a sample of dozens of clips, "in almost all cases, words in quotes had been changed or omitted without being noted, often for no apparent purpose, but in several cases to subtly change the narrative."[46][47] In a review for New Matilda, Michael Brull expressed reservations about Hari's citational practices and highlighted contradictions between the narrative in Chasing the Scream and a 2009 article by Hari.[48]
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.[49]
Kirkus Reviews praised Lost Connections.[50] In The Guardian's review of the book, arts writer Fiona Sturges alluded to Hari's earlier examples of journalism malpractice that date to his earlier period as a newspaper reporter. She noted that in contrast, Hari made notes and interview recordings for Lost Connection available.[51]
Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, Hari's first-person account of taking the weight loss drug Ozempic (semaglutide), was published in 2024.[54]
Hari falsely claimed in Magic Pill that restaurant critic Jay Rayner had taken semaglutide and the book included false statements about Reyner's opinion of the drug. Reyner had previously written that he would never take the drug, and described Hari's description as "very much defamatory". Hari apologized for the error.[55] In a review for The Guardian, science writer Tom Chivers found several misuses of references that did not support the book's claims, as well as scientific inaccuracies.[56] A fact check by The Daily Telegraph found six examples of "errors, outdated data and disputed claims". Hari said these errors would be corrected in future editions.[57]
↑Adkins, T. S.; Bulmer, N. S. D.; Jones, P. M.; Langley, H. C. (2018). A Register of Admissions to King's College Cambridge, 1934–2010. King's College Cambridge. p.988.
12Spanner, Huw (November 2004). "Let The Fiery Columns Glow". Third Way Magazine. pp.16–19.
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