The Independent C/D

This is exactly what concerned me when I read it. Most of the time I agree with what it says but the execution is hamfisted and brash. The other thing I can't quite make my mind up about is the way it's very wishy-washy about where it's going. While it's nice to have a (kind of) unbiased paper, yesterday's documentation on the hunting bans seemed pretty pointless. I did like how on the day of Charles and Camilla's engagement announcement, their front page decided to forego the story and display "the news you may have missed". Childish, I know but funny all the same.

Have to say it's the paper I buy most often though. Also: the coverage of environmental issues is excellent.

AAAAARGH DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON ANDY FUCKING GILL!!!!!

Seriously, not only is he probably the worst music writer in the country right now, he also has the worst taste. anyone who's ever read any of his opinions on a) hip-hop (or indeed any music made by black people), or b) Tori Amos, will be able to confirm this. Total rockist, too. Comes across as an utter cunt.

I sometimes like the Indie's front pages, but their insistence on treating their leads as MASSIVE SPLASHES all the time means that although they do have the occasional front page which absolutely floors me (eg the one after the US election, which nearly made me cry), they haven't realised that there is simply not going to be a story which merits such focus every single day.

The Independent on Sunday can feature some really hideous writing.

The Torygraph still has the best sports section, mind.

At the time the Independent also had a pro-European bias that was so unquestioning and extreme in its fanaticism that even I (as a then-Europhile myself - I've subsequently become a little more agnostic on the subject) I found extremely irritating. The double strands of pro-Europeeanism and pro-Majorism resulted in a rabid determination to believe in and trumpet Lamont's notorious "green shoots of economic recovery", all rather satisfyingly blown out of the water on Black Wednesday leaving the credibility of both the Tory party and the Independent so badly damaged that neither have ever completely recovered.

I switched to the Times which is at least (more or less) honest about its political allegiances, even if they are not mine.

(ducks)

They sound great. I'll vote for them.

I think The Independent is the best newspaper we've got. That isn't saying much, but it'll do. The Guardian got alarmingly New Labour at one point, I don't know if it has ventured back to the left since.

hmmm...

I am everything you despise.

I'm sounding more and more like a stereotypical Independent reader ('cept for the lib-dem thing). Out of interest, why is a city-break worse environmentally than a holiday anywhere else??

I think I'm going to embrace my inner middle-class person, rather than reject him. I didn't realise he was thriving quite so well.

Well, obviously it *did* (in, say, 1789...) -- it meant things like social justice, universal law, blah, workers control, ect. It didn't mean banning fox-hunting. Or if it did, that was fairly low down the list of priorities.

Of course city breaks aren't 'worse' than other holidays, but aviation fuel is aviation fuel, and the Indie editor's focus on this as 'what his readers do' was interesting in context (SUVs are teh evil!).

Well, okay then, it means whatever you choose to attach to it, if you choose to attach (and be attached) to it. It means nothing to me. So you're left wing...are you a Stalinist, a Trotskyite, a Marxist-Lenninist or Tony Blair? Try telling me that all of those ideologies have something in common. The attempt to draw a line from left to right in some imaginary political spectrum is doomed to failure.

I'm aware that all of the above is stating the obvious, by the way.

Yup... but if you were a member of certain social movements of that time, it also meant cutting people's heads off. Most lefties (err... didn't I just say that term didn't mean anything??) that is..most self-identified lefties don't go in for that sort of thing nowadays. And I'm not sure that anyone holds up Robespierre as the embodiment of social justice.
I take your point - but for the most part its a pretty lazy definition. Which is why I don't feel that describing anything as 'left-wing' means anything at all.

Right...I get what you're saying now. Personally, the closest I get to an SUV is when the bus I'm on is stuck behind one but apart from that I'm scarily close to this Independent reader stereotype.

The only thing, though..when did 'liberal' come to mean 'middle-class'? I mean, when did the fact that I don't eat cows come to mean that I'm a ritch bitch?? How much IS considered middle-class these days? Is 12 grand middle class??
I'm not having a go at you, by the way, this is something I see quite a lot and I don't know why the two terms are used interchangeably, except that its convenient when people are trying to de-bunk the validity of environmentalist or vegetarian ideas.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/10/theindependent.independentnewsmedia

^^ god knows what this will be like. alton is a hack and, politically, a minnow who handed over the observer to the neocons -- it had been a pretty good paper once, under hutton (and hutton's dep who actually edited the thing, name escapes me). how his steez will square with the pic-of-dolphins-plus-'CRUELTY'-era indie should be intersting.

is the indie still broadsheet size? cos that's pretty handy around the house.

no -- it might even have been the first to go tab.

that or the times.

shit so what's left in broadsheet? the guardian's shite for containing mess

the torygraph stands alone

i will be purchasing that in my weekly online shop then

FT as well. If the good lord intended you to read it in a leather armchair in your gentlemen's club then it needs to stay broadsheet.

oh yeah the FT. i never think of that as a newspaper, being economincally illterate and all that.

I think it'll probably turn into the daily version of the Observer in all honesty. The 'pictures of forest fires plus MELTDOWN' Indy isn't really a strong enough brand in its own right for its owners to get precious about.

I mean the Observer's news section has got flimsier and flimsier over the last 3-4 years and that approach would suit the Indy's whole look and feel and under-resourced newsroom pretty well.

there's also the possibility of indie and sindie merging rite?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-despite-these-riots-i-stand-by-what-i-wrote-1608059.html

My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on "abuses of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets." Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it...

...An Indian newspaper called The Statesman – one of the oldest and most venerable dailies in the country – thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested – or worse

There is no "UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights". In fact there are currently 36 Special Rapporteurs, whose various mandates include "Human Rights Defenders", "Protecting Human Rights while Countering Terrorism", "Freedom of Opinion and Expression", and, yes, "Freedom of Religion or Belief" - appointed in 2004.

That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested – or worse

you won't often find me siding with the nutters, but im firmly in the 'arrested - or worse' camp when it comes to tackling johann and his godawful newspaper.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/08/rod-liddle-edit-independent

burlimey.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Media/Pix/pictures/2010/1/8/1262967838578/Rod-Liddle--001.jpg

"This week I 'ave mostly been eating... acorns"

"if he succeeds in buying the paper in the next few weeks"

lol 'if'.

is there some kind of law that forbids anyone who isn't a complete cunt from editing a national newspaper

Something to do with complete cunts owning them I think.

on the whole, the lids is less of a cunt than roger alton. but cue grinding of gears as he has to lose his shtick and become "serious".

Did Roger Alton ever do anything as vile as this?

http://www.spectator.co.uk/rodliddle/5601833/benefits-of-a-multicultural-britain.thtml

holy shit @ this

155 members

lets not forget that rod liddle, he was the guy, who left his wife, FOR A YOUNG ONE

roger alton printed unmediated government lies in the run-up to the iraq war -- it was probably the most pro-war serious paper -- but weighing that up against liddle's attention-seeking auberon waugh impression is certainly a quandary.

All we need now is John Pilger editing the Telegraph, Peter Hitchens the Guardian and Roger Scruton Attitude magazine and all will be right with the world.

well... the indie has always printed bruce anderson as well as various sub-guardian non-entities. it's the lib dems of newspapers. liddle used to get heat from the right for being a new labour stooge when he was on the today programme.

True. The Indie has Dominic Lawson, Howard Jacobson and Michael Brown as well amidst the pinkos, so in a way the ideologically all-over-the-place Liddle might actually be quite a sutiable choice.

i kind of hoped that racist spectator piece would make his career less viable à la jan moir, not more

Getting in on the Liz Jones action:

For Umar Farouk and many other Muslim men like him, living in such a landscape is literally intolerable. He confesses that he does try to lower his gaze in front of females, wonders if he should get married because he is getting too aroused. You could make a movie, a Taxi Driver for our times, about just such an anti-hero, the hormonal male who is expected to live a life of total abstinence in the middle of licentiousness.

The Pakistani journalist Maruf Khwaja describes this inner chaos in an Open Democracy blog. In some homes they cannot watch television, listen to music, dance or indulge in anything pleasurable: "(Muslims) want to do what their secular friends do, have nights out, go clubbing, have boyfriends and girlfriends. Many are depressed by social isolation and attempt to escape by leaving parents and Islamic legacies behind."

Others, like Asif, revert. He says he had a contact list full of willing white women whom he chatted up to "get into their knickers" and now that he is a good Muslim, he talks to covered-up ladies and can "really communicate with them". The saintly Muslim female has desexualised herself, protects herself in the polluted land she lives in full of mad, bad and dangerous sinners.

Even if you overlook his increasingly batshit and offensive lol trolling, this seems an insane choice given that Rod Liddle has no experience of editing anything at all on a daily newspaper.

i think im right in saying that geordie greig (sp -- the guy who edits the standard) lacked that too. he had edited the tatler though. editing the today programme is pretty big.

Editing a radio programme is nothing like editing a newspaper, and Geordie Grieg has hardly covered himself in glory at the Standard (although he had at least worked in a newspaper newsroom).

troo.

mind you, how hard is it to "stick a headline saying CRUELTY then put a picture of a dolphin or a whale underneath it."

lets not forget that rod liddle, he was the guy, who left his wife, FOR A YOUNG ONE

vicious takedown

YAB is an eternal puzzle to me. Half her stuff is perceptive and I like, half is lazy and vile. I thought today was one of the good ones.

sindie music hack and romo pioneer simon price weighs in (and so does nick cohen):

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=252240596901&v=info

Was Suzanne Moore the one who went to the Mail in protest at the New Statesman becoming too right-wing?

yeah (she was otm!).

she of the fuck-me boots iirc.

saw her read about her teen experience of a sabbath show in the 70s recently and she was great

is this the thread where rod liddle's cuntage gets discussed on ilx?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243845/Former-Today-editor-Rod-Liddle-racist-posts-football-supporters-website.html

Judging by the comments, he'll have a fine future as a BNP candidate.

Where's the constant outcry about the vile and hateful lyrics about women and gays in rap music? Deadly silence.

One way street.
- Honest Guv!, London, UK, 17/1/2010 11:33

I keep posting "he should be hung from a yardarm" on daily mail stories but they seldom publish my comment as roger, tunbridge wells

Even more genius than the 'rap music' comment:

Anyway he's got a point about black only organisations. Also black only nightclubs, & newspapers, fine by me I don't want to join go or read them. except its again one rule for one lot and another for the majority of us. Talk about a divided society.

- rikrok, London, 17/1/2010 9:06

Talking of YAB, one of Liddle's threads (or not as the case may be)...
http://www.millwall.vitalfootball.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=26191&start=1

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/bruce-anderson/bruce-anderson-we-not-only-have-a-right-to-use-torture-we-have-a-duty-1899555.html

"After much agonising, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one answer to Sydney's question. Torture the wife and children. "

man, they'd better not let liddle edit the indie. would be so sad to see this important voice of the left lost to the dark forces of conservatism.

LJ would like you to know that he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore.

To be fair, Bruce Anderson is to The Indy as Bill Kristol was to the NYT. Surely they only publish his lunatic ramblings so the five remaining readers have something to "WTF?" at on their way to work?

Up sprang Sydney Kentridge, one of the great liberals of our age and a fearless defender of unpopular causes, from Nelson Mandela in the old South Africa to fox-hunting in modern Britain.

ah yes, mandela. still a divisive figure after all these years.

I think "in the old South Africa" was the specific caveat there.

Interesting how he doesn't even try to disguise the weakness of his argument:

"Admittedly there is no evidence…"

"That might sound frivolous…"

Also disgusting the way he reduces a moral argument as "courtroom niceties", ie "only I, Bruce Anderson, have the courage and clarity to make hard decisions."

This, otoh, is just bizarre:

"Anyway, which is the greater aesthetic affront: torture, or the destruction of the National Gallery?"

I think "in the old South Africa" was the specific caveat there.

that would probably be a sub's work

xp After careful consideration, I think I would prefer neither.

"Don't you understand, you equivocating milquetoast liberal? You must choose! Torture or the destruction of the National Gallery! There is no option C! This is THE REAL WORLD!"

This is so OTM:
http://unspeak.net/the-greater-aesthetic-affront/

Gavin O'Reilly, the chief executive of Independent News & Media, has said that a deal to sell the Independent titles to Alexander Lebedev will be announced "within 24 hours".

Lebedev is probably a pretty unpleasant character, so he'll fit right in to the fine tradition of UK newspaper proprietors.

Billionaire buys Independent for £1. Insert your own joke here.

I bought it for the first time in ages last week. It was unbelievably poor - almost completely lacking in content.

can't believe something run by gavin o'reilly could be a piece of shit

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/movie-dross-that-leaves-all-joking-aside-2012958.html

this is one of the worst articles ever of the last week that i've read in the last week

I got as far as "comedy".

David Miliband's snapping at Harriet Harman underscored why the party made the right choice. He was furious at her for clapping a repudiation of the Iraq war, because she voted for it at the time. Think about what that reveals.

He thinks once you have taken a public position, it is disgusting to change it – no matter how catastrophic it turned out to be. (A million deaths in the name of Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn't exist is a catastrophe by any standard.)

-- johann hari

the stones on this guy

I've just finished reading that article and, the thing is, Hari is broadly right. He just insists on piling on the emotional slap with a trowel that it's so easy to dismiss him as a doe-eyed whiner.

he's presumably got in mind some paragon of integrity who did publicly change his mind over iraq, can't think who.

http://www.johannhari.com/2006/03/18/after-three-years-after-dead-why-i-was-wrong-about-iraq

(he's also since changed his mind about the body count, unless he really thinks 150,000 died in the first three years and 850,000 in the last four, which seems unlikely.)

yeah i agree with most of what he says. but also with deborah orr, a little, yesterday -- isn't ed promising what new labour promised, in more propitious circumstances, in the 1990s? what is stopping labour from introducing a land tax -- i can remember the first time i saw one proposed, in the new statesman, many, many years ago -- is the sort of thing ralph miliband analysed. by personalizing it, making it all about blair, i think people are getting things twisted.

also...

But everything we have learned from the last Great Depression tells us that, if things get worse, the only way out of mass unemployment will be a big fiscal jump-start to the economy, funded by taking out more government debt in the short term. He mustn't rule out being Franklin Roosevelt and instead commit to being Herbert Hoover, just to appease the very people whose macho platitudes caused this funk in the first place.

it isn't quite like that. hoover let banks collapse. fdr withdrew the stimulus early (hiyo) didn't he? i don't know.

ed promising what new labour promised, in more propitious circumstances, in the 1990s?

Let us cling to the one tiny shread of optimism we have left.

We Are Not the Optimists

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/the-independent-launches-iii-2109899.html

that's one in the eye for the Metro in the first line there!

I like how the HTML tags have been left on the tab bar as well, as it helps to emphasise what a fine and problem-free name i is for a paper

Cool, a version of 20 minutes in English.

the indie costs £1?

stone the crows

Same as the Graun.

Apparently Lebedev has been arrested in Russia?

Looks dodgy...

Alexander Lebedev 'surrounded by Russian police'
Masked police have raided the bank of the Russian media tycoon, who is reportedly 'upset by the circus'

You dislike the Circus in Russia at your peril!

Really don't understand who this is supposed to be aimed at. The covers of the Independent could be eye rollingly bad, but the ones on i seem totally bizarre. Someone writing a book about the comparethemarket.com Meerkat and MacDonalds banning happy meals in San Francisco, hardly compare with the political upheavals in the US.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-fuck-it-lets-just-print-it-2269573.html

lol

ugh everyone is retweeting this today -- surely we've been through the whole http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/doesnt-matter-what-goes-here-2269573.html thing already at least twice

yeah sorry forget about that.

lol indie

lol "fuck"

Darius Guppy is entertaining.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/darius-guppy-growth--it-aint-happening-2295967.html

Bit of background for people who may not have heard of Mr Guppy.
Darius Guppy: Here in Iran, we look with horror at the country that Britain has become

Best bit - Look at Britain's urban hell and you will see young girls and boys armed with knives, swearing, half naked, vomiting the previous night's attempt to stifle their pain and their emptiness. Turn on the radio and listen to laddettes boasting about what they did with their boyfriends in bed the day before, but tune in to Iran's airwaves and you will hear poetry and beautiful music.

wow wtf did they print that on paper? no way im reading it, though when he brought up usury i wondered, it being the indie, where he might take it.

he's a mate of boris johnson iirc

I cannot imagine they did - it's the ultimate tl/dr. I managed to get all the way through but it never reached the splenetic highs of his previous work.

He phoned up Boris to try and get the address of a journalist he wanted to "have a word with" back when he was directing his ire at tabloids rather than international capitalism.

but tune in to Iran's airwaves and you will hear poetry and beautiful music.

Plus live coverage of this afternoon's stonings at Qom on Iran Sports Xtra

OMFG that Guppy article is like reading Ezra Pound on economics back in the 1930s.

Darius chatting with Boris...

http://www.channel4.com//services/videoplayer/popup.jsp?name=Dispatches_BorisAudio

"...he will not be put into intensive care..."

OMFG that Guppy article is like reading Ezra Pound on economics back in the 1930s.

― aka best bum of the o_O's (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, June 14, 2011 2:10 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i've never been bothered to get into it and barely know what it is, but it's sort of fascinating how little 'social credit' survived as a thing

it's got a small element of accurate analysis of the way banking system works, a big slice of scrawled-on-the-back-of-a-mental-hospital-napkin economic theory, and a dash of anti-Semitism to go

the independent on sunday is possibly even worse than the observer

http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/06/independent-columnist-johann-hari.html

http://johannhari.com//2011/06/27/interview-etiquette

https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23interviewsbyhari

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwlQ2B9trr0

hari is dogshit

xp lol

Johan Hari in "total idiot" shocka

What he did was wrong and not common practice but I get the feeling that a lot of the outrage is more to do with finally having a legitimate lightning rod for prior annoyance with Hari than the seriousness of the offence.

I've distrusted Hari, even when I want to agree with him, for years due to a suspicion of overdramatisation and I've been proved right. Exactly the sort of writer who gives left-leaning columnists a bad name.

Well, at least he's only putting words in someone else's mouth. http://devukha.blogspot.com/2003/03/ooooh-topical-or-what-just-as-i-was.html

Any bets on who is going to be eviscerated by a Twitter lynchmob tomorrow?

graham linehan?

ok probably not, but ive learnt the hard way that you've got to embrace hope

Any bets on who is going to be eviscerated by a Twitter lynchmob tomorrow?

Twynched?

His attitude of "Gideon Levy never objected, and guys it's me, Johan, everything I do is amazing!" isn't particularly helpful to his cause. Of course I'm paraphrasing remarks he made in another context, or wrote, or something.

Twynched?

twatted

dl otm

Although Toby Young having a pop at him over ethics on the Telegraph site it is a bit rich. There have been plenty of plagiarism accusations against him, which involve him taking other people's words as his own rather than putting them in the mouths of the people who said them, albeit at different times.

kinda feel sorry for him, almost, having to write for the independent being terribly overpromoted at a young age. i would have killed to have been overpromoted, obvi, but it can't be good for you really.

See: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/did_toby_young_plagiarize_pass.htmlAnd: http://assistantbrighton.blogspot.com/2007/02/toby-young-and-plaigiarism.html

Sorry, I'll try that again.
See: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/did_toby_young_plagiarize_pass.html

And also: http://assistantbrighton.blogspot.com/2007/02/toby-young-and-plaigiarism.html

being terribly overpromoted at a young age

Surprised to learn he's 32!

apparently lolrie penny (wordplay) is an indie colum nist now?

Non-attribution of quotes is totally unacceptable, and Hari's Twitter mates should be ashamed for supporting him on this. (I used to hang out a bit with Johann when I was younger, and like him very much, if that matters. But he's got no leg to stand on here. It's just obviously wrong.)

it seems such a weird thing to do. i don't know why anyone would do it, let alone think it would be okay.

i sort of understand how it happens. from what i can tell the q&a format is a bit of a swizz. and he's pushed it further. it is wrong though, the making things up.

but taking stuff out of other stuff the person has written and pretending they said it to you: so bizarre.

i mean, i get guilty when i don't let on in a piece that the interview was a phoner and that i can only describe the subject's location because they told me what the room they were sitting in was like.

but taking stuff out of other stuff the person has written and pretending they said it to you: so bizarre.

yeah this is the main thing: he leaned into me, all that

im shit at interviews

I'm trying to imagine a music journalist asking a rock legend for an oft-told anecdote, getting a rushed version, and then printing the vivid, detailed version from the star's memoir. That would be weird. I can't imagine it ever crossing my mind as an option.

"When I talked to DL about his bafflement about Hari's approach, I noticed a sad but steely glint in his pixels..."

why has this story only "broken" now? it was going around twitter a couple of weeks ago. initially i wasn't outraged cuz it was just one interview seven years ago when he was like 12, but knowing there are another two recent ones and that he's defending the practice, it's just stupidly egregious.

that said i think his "the plural of anecdote is data" style of writing is actually far more insidious a form of bad journalism that he's far from alone in. and regardless of the interview plagiarism he is just a pretty annoying writer.

it is so weird...i feel guilty if i add in an "and" or split up sentences to make the piece have a nicer rhythm...

I dunno, I totally understand the impulse for doing it -- interviews are high pressure if you're writing for a big publication and the interviewee doesn't "deliver". Or you fudge it. But it totally seems... not on, like cheating at a pub quiz or something.

I usually compensate for my subjects' rambling in speech by condensing slightly, but if I think it's going to be an issue I discuss it with the subject before we start and get their permission to smooth things over in print. I mean, one of the most annoying things about listening to playbacks is my own umms and ahs ASKING the questions. If my subject had given an answer that was lacklustre in comparison to written eloquence on a particular question, I'd quote from the text (cited as such) and contrast it with the warm slice of DUH provided on the day. THAT is how to handle JH's stated dilemma.

Yes, it's weird because it's effectively harder work to copy a quote and "insert" it an to just cite it directly. Besides, quoting a book seems doubly appropriate if your interviewee actually wrote the thing.

Sorry, should be "THan to just cite it"

Tidying up an interview response is fine: most speech when directly transcribed is messy. But tidying up just means taking out the ers, deleting the false starts (and sometimes not), and helping the subject get from a to b. It doesn't mean taking their words from somewhere else entirely.

and when i think an interviewee's already given the "perfect" response to a question i want to cover, it's easy to write that "[x interviewee] told [y publication] blah blah blah" rather than passing it off as a quote i got out of them.

an interviewee would have to spectacularly dull and monosyllabic to not deliver the bare minimum i need, there's always material there even if not in the actual words they say. only once have i had to say to the pr afterwards, look, i just need more time with them because they said NOTHING...

When I do an interview it feels like at least half my job is asking the questions and generating the chemistry necessary to produce the best quotes possible - it's not all about the write-up. If that doesn't happen, it's just cheating to pluck the perfect formulation from elsewhere. Neither reader nor subject suffer - you could argue both benefit - but it's just not sound journalism. Attribution isn't hard. Also, it's not as if he reached for one in desperation - the Gideon Levy interview is full of quotes cut-and-pasted from multiple sources.

That said, I don't think it's a terrible sin and if he'd just made a decent apology and hadn't fudged it with that blog post it wouldn't be half as big an issue.

Agree with Lex and Dorian: your job is to get the best answer, and if you need to take the answer from elsewhere, credit it.

another two dodgy hari interviews :/

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/chavez-hari-interview-goodbye
http://brianwhelan.net/post/7039951732/time-to-come-clean-johann-hari

it'd be interesting to know how much of hari's stuff which can't be independently verified is fabricated. i do not believe a single word of this, for instance:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/dec/13/gayrights.thefarright

the institute for historical review (not "of", as hari has it, he can't even get that right) did have a conference in 2002, but it was in irvine, california, not los angeles as hari says. at the time, the institute only made the location available to registered attendees, so he perhaps thought he couldn't be contradicted if he just guessed.

idk, it's a continuous urban area so maybe he thought it was still the same city, despite being 40 miles away. but if he'd been there, he'd have read the name of the hotel, which would have been the marriott irvine. never happened imo.

TBF conflating irvine with Los Angeles is not a particularly unusual or egregious error.

Not a bad success rate for a fatty who looks about 12 (xp)

his piece on muslim homophobia in east london didn't exactly ring true either

... before you howl disapproval, he's looking rather svelte these days (xp)

xp, yes, the East London piece seemed a little too pat to be true.

He has made an apology for the interview technique, though, and said he won't do it again. It's a little more humble than he initially seemed intent on playing it.

TBF conflating irvine with Los Angeles is not a particularly unusual or egregious error.

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Wednesday, 29 June 2011 13:31 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

but one you'd be less likely to make if you attended the hotel and it had "irvine" in the name? and more likely to make if all you knew was the conference was taking place somewhere in california?

also, lexisnexis has no record of him ever writing a story about this conference, until he mentions it in the guardian piece.

Yeah, conflating OC/LA not the biggest annoying thing because it's still greater LA - and because of subs and long-ago-ness, JH may not be the person who specified LA. Legally, in an interview situation, you *can* pull quotes without attribution because they are the subject's words and not the writer's - all those warmly affirmative quotes from press releases that get dropped in profiles or features have been sent to the writer in the hope that this might happen. You can even grab a quote from another interview by another journalist, for the same reason - even though some notion of fair play suggests that attribution is desirable, it's not compulsory. Personally, I'd never substitute a chunk of the subject's writing for their speech on the day or refuse to attribute another writer's quote of the person in the unlikely event that I couldn't get much from them.

As a comparison, the other night the announcer on the World Service said Michele Bachmann represented 'Minnesota' which was a bad elision of the tradition of address being 'the Congressional representative from Minnesota' (which is correct) and the standard 'representing Minnesota's 6th district'. She doesn't hold statewide office, but guy made it sound like she did. This is more misleading than OC/LA.

Most of the defence on Twitter were from left-leaning columnists enough basically along the lines of "why the rush to demonise him, it's not like he's a PHONE-HACKER or something" (translation = "he's one of us so it's okay"). Props to Matt Wells for pointing out that if you don't call people like Hari out then you don't really have the moral authority to criticise right-wing phone-hackers either.

The defenders missed the point that it wasn't mass demonisation for the most part, just a hell of a lot of pisstaking.

There's a definite whiff of "Let he who is without the first stone..." about this

is that verbatim from your jesus interview I've stolen this joke off of twitter

oi you misquoted him

I haven't really engaged with this on Twitter TBH.

The defenders missed the point that it wasn't mass demonisation for the most part, just a hell of a lot of pisstaking.

That was my impression but everyone's Twitter timeline is different so it's impossible to generalise accurately. Certainly none of the people I followed were involved in a witch hunt - most were just making hashtag jokes and a few were serious, seasoned journalists making sound objections to the fact that his blog presented this as common practice, which it isn't. There was definitely a sense from some of his defenders of "we like him and agree with what he writes, therefore everyone attacking him is a bastard." I liked Deborah Orr, who's clearly a friend of his, taking time to argue with lots of different people and conceding that he had behaved badly while saying (rightly IMO) that it was naivete rather than malice.

think naivete is being kind, it's arrogance.

naïveté is what i initially put it down to...before i realised it's habitual for him

f you don't call people like Hari out then you don't really have the moral authority to criticise right-wing phone-hackers either.

And if you don't call out people like Littlejohn then you don't really have the moral authority to criticise left-wing..er..whatever you want to call him.

There was a lot of pisstaking but Guido and his sycophants smell blood.

He's a naïveté habitué. Think D.Orr was saying it was all a while ago when he was young and inexperienced (the plagriaism not the sleeping with a 'neo-Nazi')

Also if he's reasonably consistently not getting good enough quotes in interviews then maybe he's not a very good interviewer and the Independent shoud, y'know, send someone else.

He started very young and without formal journalistic training and, in my experience, editors never discuss ethics of interviewing because they assume it's a given, so I can easily see how someone could keep bending and bending the boundaries while thinking, "Hey, nobody's getting hurt." If you develop a bad habit in your writing early on it can stick for years until an editor or a fellow writer points it out. If he didn't think it was wrong in 2003, and nobody said otherwise, why would he think it was wrong in 2011?

Even being generous to him, though, where I think he really crossed the line was by taking quotes solicited by other interviewers - even now he's falsely claiming that he only took bits from the interviewee's own prose. The daft thing is that I bet he did have decent quotes he'd got himself but got obsessed with this idea that every quote had to be perfect. Maybe that happens if you're interviewing Negri - I never had that impetus when I was interviewing Xzibit.

He got big gigs out of university. There are more than enough people (nearly all women) who started in music press or whatever as teenagers who are around 35 now and did not have training on a journalism course either*. I'm pretty sure the women I'm thinking of are rigorous because of early angst about not being treated like a child in an office, and the sense that one has to be ethically correct on the page as proof that you can run with the adults and do just as well, if not better there, was probably motivating.

*one or two went to City after their careers were well-established and now work in news journalism.

lack of formal training is a good point - i've never had any either and while i know i can get good quotes i still have no idea how one is "meant" to do an interview - while you can get guidance from editors and others with your writing, it's not like you ever get to sit in on a top interviewer actually doing the thing, or get assessed by anyone yourself. having said that i don't think it's ever crossed my mind to pass quotes from other interviews off as my own - as dorian says the test of a good interviewer isn't just in the writing, it's in the ability to extract those quotes in the first place.

what makes it particularly egregious for me isn't just how habitual it seems but how he seems to lift CHUNKS of quote at a time, not just a turn of phrase here or a sentence there.

this is the last time i felt the need to go to a quote someone else had got previously, when i interviewed the-dream in 2009:

That said, he has been quick to stick up for Milian – to whom he announces his engagement a few weeks after the interview – against such accusations. With her own singing career stalled since her departure from Def Jam in 2006, hooking up with Nash, who will produce her fourth album Elope, and release it on his own Radio Killa imprint, has been a professional as well as personal boon – and inevitably, the claws have come out. In an interview with the Rap Radar website, Nash sprung to Milian’s defence in typically humorous fashion: “To clear this up, ‘Oh, she fuckin’ for tracks’ and this shit, I be like…It’s a recession, ain’t nobody got to fuck for tracks. We basically giving them away. When I started to really want to build my label, I went looking for her. She’s talented and a good person.”

a) credited
b) pretty funny turn of phrase
c) while i was interviewing him, christina milian was draped over his lap, so it's not like he'd have said anything like that to me

But surely it would just seem counterintuitive for a journalist to think that passing off a quote from another interview as part of your own conversation was an okay thing to do? I mean, why would anyone think that?

I'm separating this from people who do that knowing full well it's wrong but that they can get away with it, but I'm not sure I believe this naivete line.

Well I've never met the guy so I don't know, and it's totally counterintuitive to me, although appropriating uncredited old material is commonplace in music mag "making of" features where the artist is either dead or won't talk to you. I once filed one with all the credits in place and the subs removed them. Someone could justifiably claim to be misled by that, I guess. What's crazy is Hari HAD the access, he HAD roughly the right quotes, but he cheated in order to make them a little bit better.

The right and wrong is clear-cut to me. I'm interested in the psychology behind it. I like to think the best of people but the more examples I read (like the Chavez one in the NS, where he's lifted a quote from a New Yorker profile) the less sympathetic I become.

I worked on staff at the Statesman some time before Hari was there, straight out of university, but I was still in touch with the people there. And they complained about this bumptious kid who wouldn't listen to advice, tried to tell production journalists – whom he saw as inferior – what to do, and treated his time there as some kind of personal fiefdom. That sounds like arrogance rather than naïvete to me. And after his years on a paper, I don't think naivete would be an acceptable excuse. He's been on national papers longer than me; I never went to journalism school either; and if I tried blaming a professional error on naïvete I'd get very short shrift indeed.

^^^I hadn't heard anything like this before but if so... sigh. JH wouldn't be in a tight spot if he'd cited the writing as the subject's and then gone on to quote the subject affirming it in person.

Music mags covering the 'making of' usually attribute the old quote to the interviewer, if it enhances the brand. If not, or the writer left under a cloud, it's 'told the NME' or 'said Bono in 1992'.

If you're doing a big profile, part of that is gathering a consensus on your subject and attributing that. It lays out the reasons why they are significant and gives that significance context, because 'blah blah blah' said X in Time Magazine is not like 'blah blah blah' said X in Pitchfork. It's a gauge of newsworthiness and it comes in damn handy in 3000/w features where you're contrasting all of it with the iteration of the subject that you're meeting on the day.

Yeah, I know good and bad journalists who've had (and not had) formal training, I'm not convinced that's an issue.

(Inicidentally, though, I can vouch for the LA/Irvine story as he told me about it at the time, er, presuming he wasn't fibbing).

ok, interesting! it's weird though, he had a piece in the new statesman in july 2002 which mentions a trip to california, but it's just a mundane account of his visit to the richard nixon memorial library. it doesn't say anything about the much more intriguing infiltration of a conference of neo-nazis.

if he told you about it - and i don't doubt that he did - wouldn't he have told his editors at the new statesman? wouldn't they have wanted some copy about it? wonder what went wrong there.

There's something here, on some crazypants site: http://www.zionismontheweb.org/boards/viewtopic.php?t=353&view=next&sid=098fd3ec87ef14570137ab80a61c5de8

I can't believe Toby Young is still getting away with pronouncing on this. Surely his own history as a plagiarist is well enough known for one of his readers to point out? I registered with the Telegraph website to do so, but it won't let me comment.

There's something here, on some crazypants site: http://www.zionismontheweb.org/boards/viewtopic.php?t=353&view=next&sid=098fd3ec87ef14570137ab80a61c5de8

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 16:32 (Yesterday) Bookmark

i missed that, i was searching in 2002, having failed to anticipate hari undergoing a bizarre neo-nazi groundhog day. in december 2002, he wrote how he attended an institute for historical review conference "earlier this year":

I sat in rooms where sweet-looking grannies would rock slightly muttering, "Kikes, kikes" under their breath as they carried on knitting.

and then in july 2003, he writes about attending an IHR conference “on the weekend of June 21st-23rd this year”:

A sweet little granny is sitting next to me, knitting a scarf. She is listening to an elderly Professor who is delivering a speech about the Holocaust. Every now and then, at the most rousing moments of the speech, this tiny old woman will mutter her agreement. “Kikes,” she says absently as she nods her head, “dirty f***ing kikes.” Nobody objects; nobody even turns to look. This Nazi granny is amongst friends here.

these nazi knitting grannies are obviously hardy perennials. but the IHR didn’t hold a conference in 2003: http://www.ihr.org/main/conferences.shtml

meanwhile, “ross”, 23-year-old oregonian neo-nazi, becomes “russ gustavson, 22, from portland, oregon”, who describes himself as a “true socialist” with a black fiancee - but don’t let that stop you, johann! - and explains his presence at a holocaust denial conference by saying “when you get to the far left or the far right, things get pretty similar.”

the question for simon kelner, who says he’s never had a complaint about johann hari’s writing in ten years or however long, is why this story isn’t available any more on the independent’s website or hari’s own and instead we have to dig it out of obscure zionist forums?

I worked on staff at the Statesman some time before Hari was there, straight out of university, but I was still in touch with the people there. And they complained about this bumptious kid who wouldn't listen to advice, tried to tell production journalists – whom he saw as inferior – what to do, and treated his time there as some kind of personal fiefdom. That sounds like arrogance rather than naïvete to me. And after his years on a paper, I don't think naivete would be an acceptable excuse. He's been on national papers longer than me; I never went to journalism school either; and if I tried blaming a professional error on naïvete I'd get very short shrift indeed.

― Trudi Styler, the Creator (ithappens), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 3:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

the guy clearly has been in over his head since day one, but it's not really 'his fault': aged 22 of course he was. and yes, obviously, he is a moron for not thinking that making shit up is wrong. would shelling out for the city course educated him? mind boggles if that's the kind of level we're on here. it's really more that morons like peter 'star of david piercing the union jack' wilby and whatever fuckwit edits the indie felt he was a good bet. all the same, lol.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/afghanistan-joya-women

This is getting ridiculous. I wonder if he's escaped this one or whether the pressure will keep up. I suspect the former.

how the hell did he think he could get away with it?

hubris

It beggars belief how he thought quote-lifting on this scale was acceptable. At first I thought it was only a handful of examples over several years but this is nuts.

as the NS blog implies, i don't think these quote-lifting pieces will dry up

Can someone elaborate about the alleged stat-fiddling in his recent "Muslims = homophobes OMG I WENT THERE" piece?

CORRECTION: This article originally said Tower Hamlets had the single highest rise in homophobic violence in the UK, when in fact it merely had one of the highest rises over the past decade. Credit to Peter Lilley for emailing to point this out.

It is also true there has been a slight fall in the homophobic violence there over the past two years, but this is almost certainly due to the fact that lots of gay people (like me) have moved out of the area. Horrific gay-bashings, posters calling for gay people to be killed, and people handing out leaflets demanding the death of gays will have that effect. To claim the driving out of gay people as evidence for a fall in homophobia is pretty perverse.

"Almost certainly"

here's some more shenanigans. this is from one of hari's orwell prize-winning pieces:

Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can't back both. You have to choose.

The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats.

[...]

A Lebanese-German who strangled his daughter Ibthahale and then beat her unconscious with a bludgeon because she didn't want to marry the man he had picked out for her was sentenced to mere probation. His "cultural background" was cited by the judge as a mitigating factor.

A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his "male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts". The bitch. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife Fatima while whipping her with a belt was sentenced to probation, with the judge citing his ... you get the idea.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-multiculturalism-is-betraying-women-446806.html

"a series of verdicts ... in the past month" - his piece appeared on 30 april 2007, but the "nishal" case took place in january, and was only publicised by her lawyer at the end of march, when the judge was sacked. ok, a bit sloppy. but according to der speigel, the "ibthahale" case was in 2005. the "zeynep" case was 2003, and was reversed on appeal in 2004. der speigel goes on to say "higher courts usually reverse these rulings", but hari doesn't mention that. the "fatima" case was 2002.

so he's conflated cases from half a decade into "the past month" and ignored the fact that in many of his examples german courts addressed his complaints, removing a judge, overturning decisions on appeal etc. it creates a completely misleading picture of german society.

it's not clear where hari got the names from, either. they're not in his acknowledged source, and the reporting on the supposed "nishal" case says explicitly that the woman's name wasn't released. it seems likely that he made them up for pathos:

Yes, it would be easy to keep our heads down, go with this multicultural drift, and congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant. But I can give you a few good reasons not to. Their names are Nishal and Ibthahale and Zeynep and Fatima, and, yes, they were women.

Obviously the NOTW business has made this look like minor pissing about but under the latest story from Guy Walters in the New Statesman there's a comment which points out that he lifted lines from here and presented them as fresh quotes in this piece. And Hari's piece is, of all things, an attack on plagiarism.

Glad to see Private Eye noted the hypocrisy of Toby Young in this matter (no, I did not tip them off).

It was going around Twitter. He was an idiot for wading in there.

What I wish more left-wing journalists had done was say what you should in all plagiarism cases, ie, let's see what else emerges. This behaviour is invariably habitual so it was daft to try and explain away the first two examples that came to light as if that were the end of it. This Guy Walters seems to have a bit of a vendetta running but I think he's right to publish examples that people send in.

Nick Cohen talks about this today.

"David R"s edits on Wikipedia.

.. and David R's IP turns out to be from ... the Indy.

Re: Cohen. Hari's article on What's Left was entirely reasonable and Cohen's hysterical reaction was entirely in keeping with his general inability to cope with any criticism of his book, or anyone who dared to stick a pin in his self-image as heroic dissident. The allegation that Hari was behind those Wikipedia sabotages can't be entirely dismissed, but Cohen is given to distortion a lot of the time himself, so any allegations he makes must also be viewed with suspicion.

lol journalism

I've been involved in editing the Johann Hari wikipedia page, and have been struggling with DaveR as a fellow editor for a long time now. Although I thought he was Hari for a long time, I think he actually is a close friend of Hari's, called David Rose, who essentially writes and maintains puff pieces about Hari on the web, to maintain his web profile. Take a look (if you can bring yourself to) at the voluminous wikipedia Hari discussion pages.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Talk:Johann_Har

only thing worse than being johann hari, editiing his own wikipedia pages, would be being a fan of johann hari's, editing his wikipedia pages for free.

Indy suspends Hari

it's been a great week for fans of Karma

Hari Hari Hari Hari Karma

Re: Cohen. Hari's article on What's Left was entirely reasonable and Cohen's hysterical reaction was entirely in keeping with his general inability to cope with any criticism of his book, or anyone who dared to stick a pin in his self-image as heroic dissident. The allegation that Hari was behind those Wikipedia sabotages can't be entirely dismissed, but Cohen is given to distortion a lot of the time himself, so any allegations he makes must also be viewed with suspicion.

― Freedom, Friday, July 8, 2011 8:51 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

usually im not a fan of researching ur life ish but this is quite impressive:

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-is-david-rose.html

as people used to say about saddam, though, they'll only replace him with someone worse

i was at a party full of left-wing activist types last weekend (they were mostly very fucking dull), a good portion of which was spent, in tandem with anna f, haranguing some awful long-haired student type who was being a save-a-hari "because he's left-wing"

Not even true he's "left wing" IMO.

probably "left wing" in scare quotes will do, he trades on being ~On Our Side~ so much

i get pretty annoyed with people who can reduce their world view to nothing more than "left wing" or "right wing" though

Hooray, more work for Laurie Penny

I like that Nick Cohen article linked to above... it is very measured but makes wise points. I was a bit surprised to like it, as I had the idea that Nick Cohen is a bit rubbish. Oh no, maybe I am turning right wing.

I have to say, having worked in offices with both people -- not that this means really anything at all -- that Johann is a lovely bloke, and Nick Cohen is a horrible bullying arsehole. Just a proviso. The person is not always the work.

you are Johann Hari, aren't you?

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/07/johann-hari-independent-prize

i don't read the NS too assiduously, but i get their emails. this guy is going hard on hari, which is fair play, but, like, has the NS admitted that it actually created him? wonder if anyone's checked his work for them.

Leftygreg
26 July 2011 at 09:06

It's Bill Clinton all over again. The people accusing him begin to appear so twisted and odious that no one can bring themselves to really get angry at the guilty party.

worry about the intellectual level of this country, once in a while

iirc the NS is for the clevers?

when "clever" and "pig stupid" go to extremes they meet again in the middle or whatever

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/13/independent-editor-johann-hari-plagiarism?CMP=twt_fd

stoked for the madness

great headline on the print edition: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/george-osborne-feels-the-pain-of-dominatrixs-claims-2353648.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-personal-apology-2354679.html

what an amazing business journalism is. what do you have to do to get sacked? i don't really give a shit: the independent is a terrible newspaper and johann hari is about what its readers deserve, but at the level of curiosity it's not clear what he's done to inspire this leniency.

;dr

Well, I often enjoyed his articles in the past, but this is grievous, grievous stuff, the admission about the Wikipedia articles shocking in particular. As for the Independent, well, I haven't read it in a long while. They employ Patrick Cockburn, so kudos for that, but otherwise *shrug*.

@alex_macpherson Alex Macpherson
Lohan Hari RT @gervasedewilde hari's journalism course commitment is reminiscent of the redemptive spell in 'rehab' for the errant celebrity
2 hours ago via UberSocial for BlackBerry

it really is the most pointless thing though. wtf is this course going to teach him?

how to love

isn't it kind of like people taking remedial driving classes instead of getting points on their licence?

Such a weaselly apology. Should have been fired.

my fav bit of the apology:

(I rose very fast in journalism straight from university.)

:D

http://jamiemalanowski.com/blogwp/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dscn0497.jpg

i like how the last sentence of his apology implies that it's his readers that need retraining, not him.

I think that was a grammatical error...the emotion got to him.

just trawled through all the blog posts and wikipedia articles about this guy. have to say, I'm surprised no-one is talking about the paedo incest story he wrote in 2006. a pretty repellent piece of work and enough on its own to get him fired imo.

link?

it's mentioned at the end of this article:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100096260/i-fell-out-with-johann-hari-–-then-david-rose-started-tampering-viciously-with-my-wikipedia-entry/

link too long, sorry

There used to be an entire section on Littlejohn's Wikipedia page about his feud with Hari. I assume Johann wrote the entire thing?

I didn't know about the Wikipedia editing before, it kind of beggars belief that Hari could be idiotic enough to think that was alright. Think he's just so egotistical he didn't care.

or just thought he could get away with it

Good grief though Cristina Odone is a complete fucking bigot. I've only just reached the last paragraph.

Stay class Silvio, and Independent subs!

http://i.imgur.com/sn8NH.jpg

"Stay classy"!

I had never knowingly read Hari before I saw him on The Late Review. He struck me immediately as the kind of bitchy queen i've met too many of especially working in theatre. His extremely self satisfied demeanour and delivery is very off-putting too.

Best summary of the Hari affair yet

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/09/unethical-journalism

xp The Nifty Archive has it. It's pretty much a generic piece of underage MM porn.

http://nifty.nisusnet.com/nifty/gay/incest/little-brother-learned-to-be-a-whore

To be fair Matt, it doesn't make you a bigot to find a story about pimping out one's underage brother distasteful. She's not saying "gay people write paedo incest porn", she's saying "Hari wrutes paedo incest porn". Which, it appears, he does.

well, it appears he has written it in the past, not that he currently writes it.

i'd be pretty unimpressed with any company that fired a person for writing paedo incest porn under a pseudonym on the internet - i mean, that shit's embarrassing, but it's not exactly a crime.

i think if i ran a newspaper and my columnist 1) lied 2) stole 3) did malicious things on wikipedia 4) and lied about it and 5) wrote incest paedo porn, i think under those circumstances i would sack said columnist

i guess none of those things are 'exactly crimes'

i don't see how item (5) has anything to do with the other items, though? for one thing, that's the only item that's honest about being fiction.

because it's just yucky

well, i suppose it has to do with johann's credibility, like the others. but im not sure what you're getting at here. hari is unmasked as a liar, fuckwit, and all-round skeezoid, and keeps his job, but you're concerned that people he has libelled are bringing up the fact he wrote incest porn? idgi.

xpost

the racial element in that story made me o_0 more than...anything else

hari is an only child right?

hari is unmasked as a liar, fuckwit, and all-round skeezoid, and keeps his job, but you're concerned that people he has libelled are bringing up the fact he wrote incest porn?

hari should lose his job and be looked down on for his fabrication, plagiarism and hamfirsted attempts at defamation in the course of his job - that's something he has done that is actually wrong, that's something that's worth getting all morally righteous about. but getting all morally righteous because his tastes in kinky sex fiction are "yucky" is like getting all morally righteous because someone has acted in porn in the past, there's something really ugly about it.

xpost oh god lex you actually went and read it? you are a braver man than me.

it's ok to be yucky, but not ugly? hmm.

i didn't read but yeah im going come right out and say it: i think writing incest paedo porn should be discouraged.

i think there's something kind of... ugly about it bc im a terrible 19th-century-style moralist

i read it this morning because i'm in an office today and knew that if i was to ever click on that URL, in case people were gonna discuss the thing, it would have to be then

this is the faulty logic of pre-caffeinated mornings, rest assured i was punished for it

remind me to tell you what hari's been doing with himself while on suspension next time i see you btw

ooooh

(though if it involves writing politics-themed ~erotica~ i do not want to know)

not gonna lie, when i first saw that url the thought crossed my mind that it might be...miliband slash

To be fair (if one must), there's a difference between underage and pre-pubescent, and to my mind "paedo" equals the latter, not the former. And besides, he waits until his brother's 16 birthday before the fucking and pimping takes place. It's a deeply moral work!

If the protagonist is over the age of consent, then in what respect is the story "paedo"?

I retract then Mike: I didn't read very far before realising it was unlikely to make my Friday morning appreciably better. So it's just incest prostitution porn, is it?

Better than that: it's BLACKFACE incest prostitution porn.

Does he credit his sources?

Weirdly, he wrote a Guardian piece in 2002 about incest which kicks off with a conveniently juicy friend-of-a-friend anecdote.

I think the letter's basically okay, but then I am biased (see above). I wish he'd written this letter first, though, rather than those two awful non-apology apologies.

The Wikipedia stuff is just weird.

http://theorwellprize.co.uk/news/the-orwell-prize-and-johann-hari/

On the afternoon of 14 September, a courier returned the plaque which had been awarded to Johann Hari on winning the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2008. There was no note of explanation. The prize money (£2000) has also not been returned. The director of the Prize telephoned the editor of The Independent who confirmed that Hari had returned the Prize, which was also confirmed later by Hari’s ‘A personal apology’, published online by The Independent.

damnnnn

that fuckin' guy

tho tbh i think most people in his position would find it hard to scrounge up £2000 to repay the prize money

pleased that they didn't let hari get away with claiming that there was nothing wrong with his orwell prize pieces, when (as exclusively revealed upthread) he lifted one of them from a piece in der spiegel while adding a few fabrications.

The Council concluded that the article contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else’s story (specifically, a report in Der Spiegel). The Council ruled that the substantial use of unattributed and unacknowledged material did not meet the standards expected of Orwell Prize-winning journalism.

He's a highly paid columnist - I'm sure he's got £2000 in the bank. Orwell Prize people clearly furious at his attempt to beat them to the punch.

http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2011/Oct/Week2/16086562.jpg

Not entirely sure about this.

yeah, it's a bit much, isn't it?

strange that they haven't made the same change to the website's masthead.

http://twitter.com/#!/PeterBradshaw1/status/123692022015078400

i actually think it's visually okay, in a daily planet kinda way, though it should be paired with the picture rather than the contents boxes - i guess 'above the fold' is still a thing w/paper copies, idk

I agree, the masthead with contents boxes are 'weighing' a bit too heavy on the rest I think

Strangely, I noticed the new masthead in the shops but totally missed the news story (which would have interested me).

http://www.illustrationartgallery.com/acatalog/BishopEagleComic.jpg

whoa, that was big. soz.

THE INDEPENDENT (and Boys' World)

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/11/independent-owner-considering-closing-national-print-titles?CMP=twt_a-media_b-gdnmedia

Shifting i to a different publisher would appear to be the death knell.

Dead.

Announcing a move to a "digital-only future", ESI Media said there would be "some redundancies among editorial employees".

But it said there would also be 25 new "digital-content roles".

#theFutureIsNow

Journalists losing their jobs is (usually) sad but has anyone actually bought a copy in years? Last time I looked it was flimsy as hell (also while playing up to the Graun-overspill crowd, it also backed the coalition at the last election).

It was a great-looking paper around 2000 or so, it gave a prominence to great photojournalism that no one else did, its front pages always looked amazing, before it went tabloid and effectively started putting the editorial on the cover.

AFAIK it hasn't made a profit in its entire history and eventually the largesse was going to run out, and it was always going to be the first to go in the oncoming print apocalypse.

Whenever I looked at it the i (as in the actual paper copy) I found it far, far better than The Guardian (I know its not quite the same but they shared a lot of the same staff)

Lol seriously?

Yes. The i has, whenever I've looked at it, had quite a few reports that were off the agenda. Clearly recall actually learning something new on most days. The arts coverage didn't have usual faff from the idiots who usually write for The Guardian who seldom know what they are on about, felt a lot better. Probably because they didn't have as much money to waste.

Its been a while - in no hurry to check on this or massively defend this point (The Financial Times arts coverage is better than either). Not a massive gap between Indepedent and The Guardian - both are Lib Dem supporting and stale concerns. No energy whatsoever. The latter is usually way more smug and annoying - as the ILX thread has gone on about it for 10+ years.

I mis-read that as like an ILX thread that has gone on for 10+ years

as the ILX thread has gone on about it for 10+ years

Because no one here read the Independent or cared enough to zing it, bar the occasional pop at Johann Hari or Simon Price. The news section was mostly abstracted and rewritten newswire content, although they did have some good long pieces. They fired most of their paid critics a couple of years ago.

In any case the i itself will continue to be published, and the Independent has had a separate editorial team for the website for some time.

There's a crunch or contraction coming in "online content" as well - most of it is crap and there isn't enough digital ad spend to justify it all existing. If it is, it's being spread too thinly.

Obviously the Guardian publishes vast amounts of smug shit and ropey cultural stuff, but it's impossible to imagine the Independent publishing something like the Snowden revelations, or pursuing the News Corp phone hacking story for as long as they did.

Part of the difference was money and resources, sure, but there was a lack of appetite at the Indy to really stand up on things like this, especially over the last few years.

has anyone actually bought a copy in years?

Without any knowledge that the Independent was under any particular threat, I bought a copy yesterday, funnily enough, probably for the first time in 15 years; I was off for lunch in a cafe and wanted a paper to read, and having already read The Guardian site that morning, it seemed like a fair idea to give the Independent a go. It didn't seem appreciably better or worse than the Guardian, though I am by no means a newspaper connoisseur.

https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/721701176606134272

"Astonishing ignorance & condescension about McDonald's. Where do these people eat? Pret? Until recently owned by McDonald's?"

noted socialist hangout pret

http://i.imgur.com/hNiVAbp.jpg

so astonished rn

https://twitter.com/wesstreeting/status/15495480046

looool

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=list%3ATweetminster%2FUKMPs%20mcdonalds&src=typd&lang=en-gb

MPs queuing up to say how much they loved their time working at McDonalds.

"trendy" "falafel" "bar"

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%22Corbyn%20Value%20Meal%22&src=typd&lang=en-gb

Going by the gaunt, grey figure in his Twitter profile pic, Rentoul isn't exactly a good advert for the McDonalds diet

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=corbyn%20we%20want%20plates&src=typd

is there remotely such a thing as a 'trendy' 'falafel' 'bar' or does wes streeting just think that kebab shops are a bit too upmarket for britain's proles

They are exotic and foreign, and also vegetarian, because only a jessie doesn't want colon cancer

I wished all them Blairite arseholes lived on a diet of McDonalds, processed meat and sugary drinks, at least then you could realistically start nominating your faves for the death list while they are still relatively young.

next thing you know these snobs will be turning down donations from popular multinationals or popular billionaires, the trendy out-of-touch loons

millions of people in this country love ciggies, you trendy snob bastards

I actually have more respect for the old Tory John Gummer, like when he did a publicity pic eating a beefburger with his daughter during the BSE crisis in the early 90's. Well at least he wasn't repping for McDDonalds ffs. At the time it was considered quite a crass bit of politicking. lol he has nothing on these shameless fucks in the Labour party.