Independent columnist Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes

This is astonishing - and if it's not a really big deal, it should be.

In the last few days, a couple of blogs have been scrutinising the work of Johann Hari, the multiple award-winning Independent columnist and interviewer.

A week ago on Friday the political DSG blog pointed out an eerie series of similarities between the quotes in Hari's interview with Toni Negri in 2004, and quotes in the book Negri on Negri, published in 2003.

Brian Whelan, an editor with Yahoo! Ireland and a regular FleetStreetBlues contributor, spotted this and got in touch to suggest perhaps this wasn't the only time quotes in Hari's interviews had appeared elsewhere before. We ummed and ahhed slightly about running the piece based on one analysis from a self-proclaimed leftist blog - so Brian went away and did some analysis of his own. And found that a number of quotes in Hari's interview with Gideon Levy in the Independent last year had also been copied from elsewhere.

So far, so scurrilous. But what's really astonishing is that Johann Hari has now responded to the blog accusations. And cheerfully admitted that he regularly includes in interviews quotes which the interviewee never actually said to him.

To be clear, this isn't just a case of referencing something the interviewee has written previously - 'As XXX has written before...', or such like. No, Hari adds dramatic context to quotes which were never said - the following paragraph, for instance, is one of the quotes from the Levy interview which seems to have appeared elsewhere before.

After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”

So how does Hari justify it? Well, his post on 'Interview etiquette', as he calls it, is so stunningly brazen about playing fast-and-loose with quotes that it's really worth reading in full. But here's the gist.

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. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview. Since my interviews are intellectual portraits that I hope explain how a person thinks, it seemed the most thorough way of doing it...

...I’m a bit bemused to find one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.

I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.

Let's recap. The Independent's top columnist and interviewer has just admitted that he routinely adds things his interviewees have written at some point in the past to their quotes, and then deliberately passes these statements off as though they were said to him in the course of an interview.

The main art of being an interviewer is to be skilled at eliciting the right quotes from your subject. If Johann Hari wants to write 'intellectual portraits', he should go and write fiction. Do his editors really know that the copy they're printing ('we stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice...') is essentially made up? What would Jayson Blair make of it all? Astonishing.