Enough trivial Twittering - the Hari case deserves a serious response

So, our early morning rant about Johann Hari's copy-and-paste interview technique seems to have generated a bit of reaction...

There's too much to sensibly sum up here really, but we would recommend a few links. The story's made it across the Atlantic, and the opening par of this post on the Washington Post site sums up what Hari did wrong better than most. The excellent FleetStreetFox has a brilliant, heartfelt post explaining why Hari has damned all journalists by association. And of course Twitter has done what Twitter does best - part-lynching, part-mocking Hari with the painfully funny #interviewsbyhari meme (you can read ten of the best here).

All of which is well and good - but beyond journalists and news junkies gossiping on Twitter, it feels like official reaction has been somewhat lacking. We don't yet know what Johann Hari will write in tomorrow's Independent, but the headline suggests it may not be entirely apologetic. The response from the editor Simon Kelner - that Johann Hari has worked for the paper in ten years and they have not had a single complaint about him misrepresenting anyone - doesn't address the issue at all, but certainly implies Hari won't be heading for the exit. And this jocular blog on the Independent's website completely, and possibly deliberately, misses the point.

Elsewhere too, it's been rather quiet. Journalists don't like writing about other journalists' screw-ups, as a rule, but even the coverage from the MediaGuardian has centred far more on the Twitter reaction to the story than the story itself. The Press Gazette, meanwhile, seems to have decided the story isn't worth covering at all - apparently with Saga magazine launching a new iPhone app and the launch of a website tackling sports churnalism, they just didn't have time.

Perhaps they too believe that this is another internet fad gossipy story, the next Jan Moir Twitter-outrage. But as we wrote this morning, if it is, it really shouldn't be.

For one of Britain's most prominent, award-winning journalists to admit to routinely copying and pasting quotes in the way that he did over a number of years, misleading readers and completely without detection, is a seriously big deal. If the Independent's senior editors had no idea he was doing it, then it surely ought to be a disciplinary if not sacking offence. And if they did know he was doing it...