Bearing False Witness
British journalist Johann Hari has been credibly accused of falsifying his reporting. And Hari's self-defense is not exactly compelling.
British journalist Johann Hari has been credibly accused of falsifying his reporting.
First a left-wing blogger offered evidence that Hari had borrowed an interview conducted by somebody else with Italian communist Antonio Negri, and then presented the quotations as responses to his own questioning.
Then evidence began to appear that Hari had used this same technique on other occasions too, taking quotations from the written record and presenting them as the product of his own questioning.
Hari's self-defense (offered on Twitter) is not exactly compelling:
When interviewing a writer for a 6000-word profile, accurately quoting their writing is not "plagiarism" or "cut & paste journalism"
That's true enough. But when the quotes are prefaced with "I meet [interview subject] at a hotel bar in Scotland ..." and individually introduced with verbal cues like "with a shake of the head" even accurate quotations can be used to create a false representation: not of what the interview subject said, but of what the interviewer did. In such a case, the story would be a lie even if the component parts were true.