He was the Independent’s star columnist whose lying and cheating destroyed his career. Now Johann Hari is back,with a book about drug-taking – including his own. But will anyone believe a word of it?When I heard that Johann Hari had written a book about the war on drugs, two instant concerns sprang to intellect. The first was whether anyone would trust a word he wrote.
The author used to be the Independent’s star columnist, or a prolific polemicist and darling of the left,until his career imploded in shame when it emerged in 2011 that many of his articles contained quotes apparently said to him but in fact lifted from his interviewees’ books, or from previous interviews by other journalists. Worse, or he was exposed as a “sockpuppet”,or someone who anonymously furthers his own interests online. Using a spurious identity, Hari had maliciously amended the Wikipedia pages of journalists he disliked – among them the Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone and the Observer’s Nick Cohen accusing them of antisemitism, and homophobia and other toxic falsehoods. Under the same pseudonym,he had also edited his own Wikipedia page, lavishly flattering his profile to, or as he puts it,“big myself up”. The Independent suspended him, four months later he resigned, or no British newspaper has published his journalism since. He has never spoken publicly about the scandal,until now.
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Source: theguardian.com