Most Larvatus Prodeo readers at some point will have come across the writings of Johann Hari, a freelance journalist who writes regularly for The Independent here in the UK. Hari has a distinctive, uncommonly direct writing voice; he is known for his strident left-wing views and for speaking out in the international media on a wide range of issues, from the immorality of some aspects of capitalism through to climate change, gay rights and the war on drugs. He is also known for his compelling interviews with global players.
It is this latter oeuvre that has landed Johann Hari in hot water. In the last twenty-four hours, it has emerged that the methodology he employs in conveying the responses of his interviewees may leave a little to be desired. Blogger Brian Whelan has discovered that some verbatim passages from Hari’s interviews attributed to the interviewees are textually identical to previously published quotes. Co-incidence? Well, no, as Johann bravely and perhaps a little naively decided to clear up himself on his blog:
When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another).
So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech.
The debate has since exploded on Twitter, (#johannhari, #interviewsbyhari), with many or most contributors seemingly allowing their political views or sparkling Twitter-wit to addle their judgement. Editor of the Indy Simon Kelner has been forced to weigh in but has so far declined to act decisively, somewhat meekly noting that he has not received any complaints about Hari in the decade for which he has written for the paper. CJ Schuler has contributed a blog to the Indy website that also somehow manages to miss the point, neglecting to mention Hari’s confessional blog post.
Is Hari a great writer and iconoclast of the left? Yes. Can his occasional “rewording” (sans explanation) of the responses of his interviewees be justified, whether in the interests of clarity and flow or for any other reason? Not a chance. When I read an interview, I should have the right to assume that what it has been reported that the subject contemporaneously said is what they actually said. It is surely a prime obligation of the interviewer to make clear to the reader where any obfuscation or alteration in their presentation of the remarks of their subjects has taken place. I don’t necessarily need to read the subject’s “ums” and “ahs”, but what is conveyed to the reader needs to align as closely as possible with what they actually said. If it is permissible to substantively diverge from this for stylistic reasons, the whole point of conducting conversational interviews is called into question. What is the point – so that a hyper-edited amalgam of the subject’s best ever quotes can be published together with a bit of journalistic “over lunch”, “he shifted in his chair” wrapping?
It’s not for me to judge what The Independent should do, but I would be very surprised if the paper didn’t move immediately to implement guidelines explicitly banning this sort of practice. Johann’s interesting but ultimately self-destructive mea culpa on his blog surely would probably not have warmed the cockles of his various editors, publishers and professional colleagues. Given how unedifying this episode has been for all these folks and arguably the broader journalistic profession, one would have to think that a firm public reprimand is in order for Hari, together with some further organisational consideration regarding the rights and responsibilities of journos who blog.
UPDATED: Johann’s humble and worthy response to the allegations is now on his blog.
I wonder if any of his interviewees actually noticed or objected to this practice? Surely some of them must have read the published version of their chats, and none commented or complained…? Could it be seen as collusion, in that the subjects came across as a little more eloquent than they otherwise might have? An interesting revelation….
It’s impossible to have a real debate on twitter for the simple reason that just as soon as you start freely expressing an idea you run out o
“Is Hari a great writer and iconoclast of the left?’
More, ‘predictable and derivative,’ I would have thought. But I certainly don’t think that his is a hanging offence and some of the ‘Harigate’ commentary has the distinct whiff of schadenfreude about it – albeit, some of the tweets have been very entertaining.
Every time I’ve been subjected to media interviews, I’ve found things in between inverted commas that were not what I said. the first couple of times I called up to ask about it and was told “well, that’s the gist of what you meant isn’t it?”. the most recent time, they quoted me saying exactly the opposite of what I said, but that was about Greens preferences at the last federal election and I should have expected it. And Journos I spoke to about it just shrugged and said ‘ah, it happens all the time, don’t worry about it.’
Journalists are making up quotes all the time. Believing that what’s in the inverted commas is accurate is naive.
d
Guy Rundle said:
I totally agree. Now if we can just get the Murdochracy and their pets at #theirABC to agree to that, we will have made some progress.
wonder if any of his interviewees actually noticed or objected to this practice?
Guy both you and this commenter display a touching naivety regarding journalism and interviews. I can tell you, the majority of interviews you read, are not direct quotes – or even indeed quotes in many meaningful sense at all.
It is common – if not standard – to make up quotes to ‘capture the sentiment’ better. A conscientious journalist will give the subject an opportunity to approve them or not, but that’s about it. The majority of journalists don’t do that. People don’t complain about it, because people who are regularly interviewed in profiley pieces are so used to it that it would barely register any more.
Few journalists even bother recording interviews – and even fewer bother actually transcribing said recordings. It’s a lot of work to do that; the time/writing metric is way down compared to straight editorial.
People don’t realise how much of what the read is fabricated at one point down the line or another. It’s a truly depressing amount.
Disappointing. This pretty much casts a lot of his previous work in doubt and vindicates the right on pretty much every single topic he’s written about.
Thanks a bunch.
A female friend of mine, when in her childhood, impersonated a boy so that she could play junior rugby union with two of her brothers. After two years her real identity and gender were discovered, but she continued playing, and was the subject of an article in one of Sydney’s Sunday tabloids. The article purported to quote her and both of her parents, yet the journalist in question had spoken to nobody from the family; the quotes were a fabrication.
I feel I should care, but I sort of don’t. That’s because I don’t believe anything I read in a newspaper or see on TV is more than an approximation of what happened. It’s too late to go back – this is what journalism is now: something cut, pasted, edited, photoshopped, heard, assumed ….
The guy didn’t make up this stuff – it did come from the interviewee, in a more eloquent from, it was just time-shifted.
Each week the New Statesman has a page headed “The NS Interview” and under that a big quote – which is never exactly what is in the interview. I think Brian did the same recently on this blog, and I don’t doubt his integrity. It seems quote marks can now be used if you want to say “this is what s/he meant”. I also suspect those NS interviews are done by email or telephone, which I suppose is more properly an exchange, rather than an interview.
Here is the Tele’s selection of the wittiest “Harigate” tweets.
VerityViolet @ 1 – Apparently not if Hari’s and Indy editor Simon Kelner’s comments on the issue are any judge. Of course, I guess in general one would not object to having one’s thoughts rendered in a more readable format by the interviewer.
TimT @2 – Very true
Darryl @ 4 & patrickg @ 6 – I don’t really doubt that a lot of published interviewers indulge in a spot of smoothing and reshaping when delivering the final product. On the other hand some publications and interviewers are undoubtedly more careful with their methodology, respecting the contemporaneous nature of their product a bit more. Just because some journos make stuff up or “magic up” quotes from the past doesn’t mean that its right!
Fran @5 – I’m not Guy Rundle!
I dunno, whenever I’ve done an interview I write it up, (often slightly editing questions and responses in a way which seems positive to me) and then I send the script to the interviewee for him to sign off on. But I’m not a journalist. The immediacy of an interview may be important but in general, I would think that the content of the message is primary.
Guy,
I mean without reading through the whole thing, what is the issue here? Ownership? The definition of the interview? The aspect of the writer?
Is this criticism designed to somehow make newspapers better?
I’m sad to say that I’m not very surprised by this. I enjoy Hari’s writing and broadly agree with his points in most of his articles. At his best, he can be a very forceful voice in political writing.
However, from the very first time I encountered his articles (reading long a piece he did about Dubai) I found myself spotting factual errors. Not crucial stuff mind you, but things that seemed to have been added in to give “colour”. It was as though he didn’t feel that the simple truth made his point well enough, so he had to embelish it. And it was clear to me that these things were deliberate falsifications too, they weren’t the kind of thing you could miss if you’d been there.
Again, it wasn’t anything that would change the overall points he was making – that Dubai is an absolute monarchy with a medieval justice system, that it has major environmental problems, and tends to treat its mostly Pakistani workforce badly by Western standards – but the falsehoods did tend to weaken his argument when you were aware of them. You had to wonder, what else did he make up?
I’ve since found other “embelishments” in articles by Hari that concern things I have personal knowledge of, and it does make me take his reportage (as opposed to his logical arguments and rhetoric) with a pinch of salt. It is an unfortunate, but consistent flaw.
And while it is true that massaging, polishing and generally editing quotes by interviewees is commonplace (it helps make newspapers readable), simply faking it is not acceptable in a serious writer. If you are quoting something your interviewee said in another forum, you have a simple responsibility to let your readers know. It isn’t hard. Hari has committed a sin here, and let himself and his readers down.
Joe, the key issue is that Hari has, on occasion, taken what people have said in existing published copy and inserted it into or replaced passages from his published interviews, as if they said it when they spoke to him.
There’s been no suggestion that the gist of what he has added or “replaced” from the actual interview is radically divergent from what the they said – but Chris in Perth @13 is on the money:
Johann’s humble and worthy response to the allegations is now on his blog.
Guy said:
My apologies to both of you.
Really? Then you ought be able to give 10 examples without breaking a sweat.
Well one thing that this incident has done has turned me on to Johann Hari’s writing, which had totally passed me by. Just reading his potted bio on wikipedia, he sounds right up my alley.
Bit of a shame about the lifting thing. I accept his argument that as a matter of communication of what the interviewee was trying to say, and as a part of a larger story that it’s OK, and it’s an improvement to the story/message, but it is dishonest and lazy to not attribute or to correctly place quotes. It wouldn’t have hurt to have qualified the quotes, making it clear that what had been said, while still the words of the interviewee, were not said right then. I would be particularly peeved if I was the person who’d conducted the original interview.
I can’t see the problem so long as he gets the sentiments right. He is already fundamentally changing the message by transcribing into text what was actually conveyed by speech, gestures, body language and intonation. And of course when listening to somebody we make allowances for mistakes and lack of clarity that we do not so readily allow for text. So I think the writer should do whatever he can to make sure the “quotes” accurately match the quoted point of view. Of course, he should check with the interviewee that they are happy with the “quotes”.
Guy,
Hari’s response is shamefully misleading and self-serving. He belatedly admits that: “…an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee.” But then he also says: “Plagiarism is presenting somebody else’s intellectual work as your own” His conclusion? No plagiarism, because all quotes actually come from the relevant interviewee and are appropriately attributed. Of course, anyone can see that he has sidestepped the real instance of plagiarism, which is his passing off the responses to another interviewers’ questions – the obvious output of other journalists’ “intellectual work” – as the responses to his own, presumably less eliciting, questions. It’s pretty clearly plagiaristic – he’s appropriating someone else’s *report* of an interview without attribution, and all his “admission” does is deliberately muddy the waters.
BBB
To simplify my position, I don’t think the relationship between him and the interview subject is any different to what it would ahve been, and the trust between him and the reader isn’t much changed (though it is diminished), what’s shitty is that he’s stolen other people’s work.