The Independent suspended him, four months later he resigned, and no British newspaper has published his journalism since. Under the same pseudonym, he had also edited his own Wikipedia page, lavishly flattering his profile to, as he puts it, “big myself up”. Using a false identity, Hari had maliciously amended the Wikipedia pages of journalists he disliked – among them the Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone and the Observer’s Nick Cohen – accusing them of antisemitism, homophobia and other toxic falsehoods. Worse, he was exposed as a “sockpuppet”, or someone who anonymously furthers his own interests online. The author used to be the Independent’s star columnist, a prolific polemicist and darling of the left, until his career imploded in disgrace when it emerged in 2011 that many of his articles contained quotes apparently said to him but in fact lifted from his interviewees’ books, or from previous interviews by other journalists. The first was whether anyone would trust a word he wrote. When I heard that Johann Hari had written a book about the war on drugs, two immediate concerns sprang to mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |