Remember this from yesterday?

From this week’s Private Eye (page 5) … in full… (saving you a quid fifty is my middle name).

Hackwatch
The Trouble With Hari

A LITTLE-KNOWN fact about the 28-year-old Indie pundit Johann Hari is that he used to work for Jeffrey Archer. In Lord Archer’s prison diary for 7 August 2000 - while he was banged up in Belmarsh - he mentions receiving a letter from “my young researcher Johann Hari’, who was assisting the great fabulist with his novel Sons of Fortune. The boy-wonder clearly learned from the master: not only has Hari now been caught displaying a “gift for inaccurate precis” (as Mary Archer once described Jeffrey’s talent) but he is threatening to sue a hack who dared allude to it.

The trouble began last month when Hari reviewed Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left? for the American magazine Dissent. It was a scathing critique - but it also attributed to Cohen several opinions which were the exact opposite of those he argued in the book. (When challenged about the misrepresentations - his claim, for example, that Cohen’s parents raised him “to see Orwell in Catalonia as his moral archetype” – Hari explained that although Cohen didn’t say this in What’s Left? he had once said something similar during a drunken dinner at the Groucho Club.) Cohen promptly wrote an angry riposte which Comment posted on its website a fortnight ago. Then the fun started. On the Harry’s Place blog, to which Hari himself used to contribute occasionally, a blogger who uses the pseudonym David T quoted some of Cohen’s reply. He then added a comment of his own: that for anyone who aspires to be a serious commentator or non-tabloid journalist, “a reputation for making things up should be career death”.

Hari went ballistic, demanding that unless these “libellous comments” were taken down immediately he’d take legal action. The lndie lawyers, he revealed, had assured him that he could sue and win. David T replied that if he was forced to remove the post he’d replace it with an explanation of why he had to do so. And so it came to pass.

The next day, Hari put a message on his own website claiming that (a) David T had been contacted by the lndie lawyers, and (b) had admitted that what he wrote was without foundation. Both these statements were untrue.

Over at Harry’s Place, David T observed wryly that he couldn’t say what was wrong with Hari’s statements without repeating the alleged “libel” - ie that Hari was making things up. This gave Hari another fit of the abdabs. Warning the blogger that the lndie had agreed to back him in a libel action and he’d get huge damages, he demanded that. Harry’s Place issue an apology. David T said that although he might apologise for upsetting the poor sensitive hack he wasn’t prepared to accept that he’d defamed him. Besides, he would only put up a statement of any kind if Hari in turn apologised for threatening to sue him. Hari refused to participate in what he called “moral equivalence”. Needless to say, the spat has provoked some comment in cyberspace - most of it very rude indeed about the Hari (and none too complimentary about the Indie’s apparent willingness to support his litigious threats). A comment by one blogger, Francis Sedgemore, has the headline: “Johann Hari is a big daft cock!” Sedgemore also noted that the Eye had made similar allegations against the “petulant brat” as long ago as March 2003 without a sniff of a writ though Hari did write a letter to the Observer later that year denouncing our “silly lies” about him. “Even the slightest factual analysis of Private Eye’s retaliatory accusations causes them to immediately crumble into dust,” he claimed.

Alas! By the time the Observer letter appeared, yet another of his own columnar pillars had crumbled. On 26 March 2003 Hari had regaled Indie readers with the tale of Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor who travelled to Iraq as a human shield but was then “shocked back to reality” by the discovery that the Iraqi people all supported a US invasion. But, as many readers wrote to inform Hari, the whole story was a propaganda fabrication by right-wingers associated with the Moonies and had already been exposed as such elsewhere. Eventually, after further pressure, he added a PS to his column on 25 September 2003: “It transpires that Kenneth Joseph was probably a bullshitter, and that his claims were false. I should have checked his story out more rigorously before I used it…”

In those days Hari was as vehemently pro-war as he is now anti. “Last October, I spend a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein,” he wrote in the Indie on 10 January 2003. “Most of the Iraqi people I encountered… would hug me and offer coded support [for an invasion].”

Alas again! He had actually spent a fortnight in Iraq as a holidaymaker, on a package tour visiting archaeological sites - and in a Grauniad piece about the trip on 3 December 2002; had complained that “it was very difficult to get Iraqi people to express their feelings… I blundered about asking fairly direct political questions, which caused people to recoil in horror… Many people asked quite genuinely ‘why your government hates the Arab world’.” Yet in an Indie column only a few weeks later he claimed that people in Iraq kept asking him: “When will you come to tree us? When’ will we be able to live again?” Since these pleas from Iraqis yearning for Western intervention must have struck him as newsworthy, why hadn’t he mentioned them in his original Guardian feature? It is a question that might even tax the imagination of Jeffrey Archer.

Another fucking Douchebag here. And more Überdouche here.