Johann Hari and Me by Nick Bryans

The formerly ‘esteemed journalist’ Johann Hari this week issued a second full-and-frank apology following his suspension from The Independent, due to plagiarism and sock puppetry (sabotaging rival journalists’ Wikipedia entries). In his apology, Hari stated;

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.

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.

The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, 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.

Now as a fellow leftie, Hari’s actions felt detrimental not just to his career, but to the ‘left-wing’ cause. But not just that, myself and Hari are infact good friends. As a fellow journalist, our careers have taken different paths since we met many years ago, when we were rival auditionees to be the third member of Bros. I couldn’t really hold a tune but provided my own pair of those shoes with the Grolsch flip-lids in the laces, which I thought may give me a chance from a ‘cost cutting’ respect. Hari too wasn’t the finest singer, but played a mean Jazz sax solo, which he thought may convince Bros to go down a blues route. In the end, the Goss brothers plumped for Craig Logan, and myself and Hari found common ground in our mutual disappointment. It wasn’t till half a decade later when we met again, when we were both signed by small but ambitious football team Norwich. We formed a formidable midfield with greats of the game like Daryl Sutch and Ruel Fox, culminating in THAT famous night in Munich, where a fizzer from Jeremy Goss (not a member of Bros) and a glancing back post header from Mark Bowen saw us overcome German giants Bayern Munich, and advance to the next round of the European Cup. I still have this photo on my fridge:

The fridge may have changed (have this delicious SMEG number now. Pale blue with ice-maker on the front. Makes you feel like you’re working in a 1950s American diner) but the memories remain untouched. Realising that I would be one of the few people Johann may talk to at this time (Probably Ruel Fox as well, but fuck knows what he’s up to these days) I managed to get a chance to see him.

Unsure how to approach Hari, as it has been a few years, I was thinking of simply meandering up his driveway in full Norwich kit, with ‘When Will I be Famous?’ bellowing out of my car, like a sort of wrestling entrance theme. Instead I just knocked on the door.

He greeted me ashen face, with the look of someone who, after committing one of the most flagrant and brazen journalistic cock-ups of recent memory, felt the full wrath of the draconian 3 month unpaid suspension that the Independent had served to him.

We sat down and had coffee on his beautiful wooden table, which he claimed was a present from Timmy Mallet after they bonded during one of Timmy’s infamous, late 90s ‘sluts and vicars’ parties. But at this stage, I just don’t know what to believe.

NB: See, Johann, the general public is finding it hard to sympathise with you. Not only did you only fess up to your ‘crimes’ after the evidence against you was irrefutable, but even then you were very reticent to admit to doing anything wrong.

JH: You see, one can only see the magnitude of his transgressions when he has been paraded down the hallway of public scorn, held in stocks made by guilt and despair.

NB: That literally makes no sense.

At this time, Johann did what most ‘artists’ do when people argue that their conceptual pontificating makes no fucking sense, and shoots a glance towards his Orwell prize for journalism. Only, it’s no longer there, after he handed it back following his conviction for plagiarism, and merely a light area of wall remains, a bit like when bailiffs remove a TV set from a house. Feeling the warmth from this heated debate, Hari removes his jumper to reveal a T-Shirt saying ‘FRANKIE SAYS: UNWIND AND SIMMER DOWN’. When I suggest that this is perhaps an incorrect quotation from the Frankie Goes to Hollywood frontman, Hari aims a caustic stare in my direction.

How different things could have been......

NB: Now, Johann, why did you feel the need to fabricate what people were saying?

JH: As I previously stated, sometimes what people say doesn’t transfer down to paper very well. You see, when I’m interviewing a refugee in Congo, she may say one thing about the need for basic rations for her and her children, but what she means is ‘This is all David Cameron and Christine Odone’s fault’. All I was merely doing was making her thoughts transfer to paper.

NB: How do you know that’s what she was trying to say?

JH: Because Christine Odone is a complete bitch. Everyone knows this. Haven’t you read her Wikipedia entry?

NB: Ah yes, that’s another thing. You’ve also admitted to writing ‘juvenile and malicious’ things on people’s Wikipedia entries, acting under the pseudonym ‘David Rose’. These include very serious things including accusations of anti-Semitism, homophobia and alcoholism.

JH: Yes, I admit that was wrong. And I do apologise for this. But as Jesus once said to me in a chance meeting outside Manchester’s Kansas Fried Chicken eatery, ‘Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone’.

NB: Jesus said that to you?

JH: Possibly. I can’t quite remember. It was around the time I was writing a script for The Gladiator 2. You know, where he is reincarnated and fights in the Second Word War. So everything around that time is a bit of a blur.

NB: Wasn’t that Nick Cave?

JH: Don’t think so. I was jamming with him last week and he never mentioned anything.

Realising that my parking ticket is almost up, and also that I’ve left my car playing Bros’ 1988 album ‘Push’ at full blast out the stereo and may be causing quite the seen, I see this as an opportune moment to wrap things up.

NB: So do you have anything to say to readers who now believe your work is worthless?

JH: 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.

NB: The problem is, Johann, that by being allowed to stay on with the Independent, the example you are basically setting to aspiring journalists is that you should lie, cheat and steal your way to the top, then once there, people will cover your arse for you. Your allegations of plagiarism go all the way back to when you were booted off a student newspaper for similar offences. You have had sufficient warning against this sort of stuff, and rather than seeing this as a ‘second chance’, you stuck two fingers up at common decency in journalism, and continued on this path of bullshit reporting, name-calling and vitriolic lies, and it won you a job as a top journalist which you are seemingly impervious to dismissal from. The problems are two-fold. Firstly, seeing how you’ve secured your position, what incentive does ANY young journalist have to follow appropriate journalistic practices, considering how seemingly ‘untouchable’ you are at The Independent? Secondly, how can you now interview someone, and for the reader to take anything you write seriously, considering your documented history of producing inaccurate filth? How, Johann, can any of these problems be overcome by a 3 week suspension and journalism training in New York?

JH:……Is someone playing Bros outside?

Realising my time is up and that I’ve more chance of getting a straight answer from a magic 8 ball, I bid farewell to my old friend and make a move to my vehicle. In what is a dark day for both left-wing reporting and journalism, one hopes that, with time, we can all recover from it. As I drive home, I put on the commentary from that famous night in Munich, and think of a happier time for myself, Hari, and planet earth (and Jeremy Goss, to be fair. I mean, he didn’t achieve much more after that game. Think he’s done a few charity bike rides since but, well, it’s been downhill since 1993 for Gossy.)

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