Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British-Swiss writer and journalist who wrote for The Independent and The Huffington Post. In 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct. He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, and the effect of technology on attention spans.
Early life
Hari was born in Glasgow, Scotland to a Scottish mother and Swiss father, before his family relocated to London when he was an infant. Hari states he was physically abused in his childhood while his father was away and his mother was ill.
He attended The John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with Harrow, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth form in Finchley. Hari graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.
Hari is gay. He wrote an article claiming he had sex with men who were members of homophobic far-right and Islamist groups, stating that with drugs and "a lot of flattery" he "coaxed" a nineteen year old Muslim into "wild gay sex".
Early career
In 2000, Hari was joint winner of The Times Student News Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Cambridge student newspaper, Varsity.
After university, he joined the New Statesman, where he worked between 2001 and 2003, and then wrote two columns a week for The Independent. At the 2003 Press Gazette Awards, he won Young Journalist of the Year. A play by Hari, Going Down in History, was performed at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh, and his book God Save the Queen? was published by Icon Books in 2002.
In 2005, Hari wrote an article in The Independent entitled Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize, arguing that Harold Pinter, due to a misguided and misinformed anti-Imperialist and anti-war stance, should not have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pinter's official, authorised biographer, Michael Billington commented that Hari "dismissed (Pinter's ) Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler." In addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work also appeared in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El País, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Haaretz, and he reported from locations around the world, such as Congo and Venezuela. He appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show and was a book critic for Slate. In 2009, he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain.
2011 plagiarism, fabrication and misconduct scandal
Plagiarism
In June 2011, bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group, as well as Yahoo! Ireland editor Brian Whelan, asserted that Hari had plagiarised material published in other interviews and writings by his interview subjects. For example, a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya included quotations from her book Raising My Voice in a manner that made them appear as if spoken directly to Hari. Hari initially denied any wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not present someone else's thoughts as his own. However, he later said that his behaviour was "completely wrong" and that "when I interviewed people, I often presented things that had been said to other journalists or had been written in books as if they had been said to me, which was not truthful". Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent and in January 2012, it was announced he was leaving the newspaper.
The Media Standards Trust instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize, who had given their 2008 prize to Hari, to examine the allegations. The Council concluded that "the article contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else's story" and did not meet the standards of Orwell Prize-winning journalism. Hari returned the prize, though he did not return the prize money of £2,000. He later offered to repay the sum, but Political Quarterly, which had paid the prize money, instead invited him to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell had been a member. Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in instalments when he returned to work at The Independent, but he did not return to work there.