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# Hari: Knave or Fool?
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2011/09/hari_knave_or_fool/
- Published: 2011-09-19T11:22:59.000Z
- Updated: 2022-01-07T10:31:13.000Z
- Description: Journalists Johann Hari has been exposed as using others work in his own without acknowledgement, and maliciously editing Wikipedia.
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: ethics, Johann Hari, journalist, trolls, wikipedia

![Troll Face](https://i0.wp.com/www.onemanandhisblog.com/content/images/2011/09/00trollface1.jpg?resize=159%2C140)

[Greenslade argues fool](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/sep/19/johann-hari-plagiarism?ref=onemanandhisblog.com):

> I admit that, having written that I didn’t believe Hari guilty of passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as his own, it did give me pause for thought.  
> But I concluded, in company with other sympathetic journalists – of left and right and centre, such as Deborah Orr, Ann Leslie and George Brock – that Hari had been a fool rather than a knave.

And I’d be prepared to lean that way, if it wasn’t for this part of [Hari’s apology](http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-personal-apology-2354679.html?ref=onemanandhisblog.com):

> 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. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.

I find it interesting that most journalism commentators skim over, or completely ignore, this part of the story, as Greenslade did. To me, that violation of basic web ethics makes Hari a troll and a knowing troll at that. Hence: a knave.

**Update**: Tom Chivers [delves deeper into Hari’s alternate identity](https://web.archive.org/web/20110923183817/http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100105678/we-lefties-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-forgive-johann-hari/):

> At one stage Johann Hari quotes David Rose in his blog, giving him biographical details like “a starred first from a degree specialising in environmental science at Cambridge, and extensive work in Antarctica observing the effects of global warming”, to support a point Hari himself is making. Green counts “at least fifteen biographical facts (from a lawyer girlfriend in Walthamstow and subbing jobs at the Independent and Spectator, to a principled and noisy opposition to the invasion of Iraq)” about David Rose, none of which were true, because there is no David Rose. “\[It\] was a fluent stream of lies contrived just so that the systemic smear campaign and dishonest self-promotional exercise could carry on and never be exposed”, he says.

Perhaps Hari should just admit that he’s a fiction writer rather than a journalist and move on…?

[\[via Shane Richmond\]](https://web.archive.org/web/20170427220428/https://twitter.com/shanerichmond/status/115742509883326465)