Johann Hari apologized for the way he handled interview quotes.
Unlike his previous apology, Hari also says he’s taking an unpaid leave of absence from The Independent to brush up on Journalism 101, undertaking to footnote his online articles, and returning his Orwell Prize.
Hari also confesses to some sock puppetry on Wikipedia:
The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too.
More about the paper’s internal investigation at The Guardian.
It’s been a rough year for The Independent’s stable of commentators. In addition to Hari’s brush with plagiarism, The Independent also paid damages to the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, after Robert Fisk erroneously reported that he had ordered security forces to use live ammo against demonstrators.
And more recently, the Indy dumped blogger Jody McIntyre after his overenthusiasm for Palestine and his incendiary tweets during the London riots proved too embarrassing for the paper.
© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
