Johann Hari

Hari was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a Scottish mother and Swiss father,[6] before his family relocated to London when he was an infant.[7] Hari was physically abused in his childhood while his father was away and his mother was ill.[8]

According to Hari, he attended the John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with Harrow School, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth-form in Finchley.[9] Hari graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.[10]

In 2000 he was joint winner of The Times Student News Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity. After university he joined the New Statesman, where he worked between 2001 and 2003, and then wrote two columns a week for The Independent. At the 2003 Press Gazette Awards, he won Young Journalist of the Year.[11] A play by Hari, Going Down in History, was performed at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh, and his book God Save the Queen? was published by Icon Books in 2002.[11]

In addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work also appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El Pais, The Sydney Morning Herald and Ha'aretz, and he reported from locations around the world such as Congo and Venezuela.[12] He appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show, and was a book critic for Slate. In 2009 he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain.[13]

In 2011, Hari was the subject of two scandals involving his conduct as a journalist. First, he was accused of plagiarism by including in his articles quotes that his interviewees had previously given to other journalists, as if they were the product of his own interviewing. Subsequently, he was found to have anonymously edited the Wikipedia pages of a number of critics of his work so as to present them in a negative light. These behaviours resulted in significant damage to Hari's reputation, and he was asked to return the 2008 Orwell Prize. He was suspended and then resigned as a columnist for The Independent.

Accusations of plagiarism were initially made by bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group and Brian Whelan, editor of Yahoo! Ireland, who asserted that some of Hari's interviews contained material published in previous interviews and written works by his interview subjects.[14][15][16] For example, a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya included quotations from her book Raising my Voice in a manner that made them appear as if spoken directly to Hari.[17] Hari initially denied wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not involve passing off someone else's thoughts as his own,[18] [19] but would later say that his behaviour has been "completely wrong" and that "when I interviewed people I often presented things that had been said to other journalists or had been written in books as if they had been said to me, which was not truthful."[20] As a consequence, Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent,[21][5] and shortly afterwards resigned from this role. The Media Standards Trust instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize to examine the allegations, [22] [23] which resulted in Hari returning the 2008 Orwell Prize [24]

Hari did not return the prize money of £2000.[25] Hari later offered to repay the sum, but Political Quarterly, responsible for paying the prize money in 2008, instead invited him to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell had been a member. Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in installments once he returned to work at The Independent.[26] However, he did not return to work there.

In mid-2011, Hari was also revealed to have made anonymous pejorative edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct[27][28][29] after Nick Cohen raised concerns in The Spectator.[30] He wrote that he had been attacked on Wikipedia by an editor named "David Rose" (which was later identified as one of Hari's pseudonyms)[31] following a dispute with Johann Hari, and the same editor had made similar changes to the Wikipedia pages of Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone,[32] and Oliver Kamm, a leader writer for The Times[33] after they had been critical of Hari. Cohen also wrote that Hari's own Wikipedia entry had been edited by Rose "to make him seem one of the essential writers of our times".[30] After "David Rose" was later shown to be a pseudonym of Johann Hari, Hari made a public apology for his behaviour.[34]

In January 2012, after leaving The Independent, Hari announced that he was writing a book on the war on drugs, which was subsequently published as Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.[35][36]

His 2015 T.E.D. talk entitled "Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong" has been viewed over 15 million times (as of 22 February 2020), and lays out the idea that most addictions are functional responses to experiences and a lack of healthy supportive relationships, rather than a simple biological need for a particular substance.[37]

In January 2018, Hari's book Lost Connections on depression and anxiety was published, with Hari citing his childhood issues, career crisis, and experiences with antidepressants and psychotherapy as fuelling his curiosity in the subject.[8] Kirkus Reviews praised the book.[38] Material from the book was criticised by neuroscientist and Guardian writer Dean Burnett, who pointed out that Hari appeared to be reporting as his own discoveries material — such as the biopsychosocial model – that has been common knowledge for decades, and for misrepresenting the medical, psychiatric and scientific establishments as "some shadowy monolithic organisation, in thrall to the drug industry".[39]

He delivered a T.E.D. talk in July 2019 entitled "This could be why you're depressed or anxious" discussing the themes in the book Lost Connections.[4]

• Newspaper Journalist of the Year at Amnesty International Media Awards 2010[40] for the article Congo's tragedy: the war the world forgot.[41]
• Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism 2010[42]
• Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, 2009[43]
• Cultural Commentator of the Year at the Comment Awards 2009[44]
• Author of Story of the Year at the Environmental Press Awards 2008[45]
• The Orwell Prize for political journalism, 2008[46] (withdrawn 2011)
• Newspaper Journalist of the Year at Amnesty International Media Awards 2007[46] for the article The dark side of Dubai.[47]
• Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2003[48]
• Student News Journalist of the Year by The Times in 2000[49]

• Johann Hari (2002). God Save the Queen?. Icon Books. ISBN 978-1-84046-401-6.
• Johann Hari (2015). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-620-408902.
• Johann Hari (2018). Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-632868305.

• Journalistic scandal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Johann Hari.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Johann Hari

• Official website
• Articles about Johann Hari in The Guardian
• Articles for The Independent
• Commentary Magazine profile of Hari
• Chasing the Scream Official Website
• Works by or about Johann Hari in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Johann Hari at TED