"Never explain, never apologise." Evelyn Waugh’s pompous maxim never looked better. For those of you with better things to do than to trace the career agonies of plagiarists and fantasists in British letters, let me summarise the Johann Hari affair thus far:

Preening leftist hack and recipient of numerous journalism awards (Orwell Prize, Amnesty International) gets caught co-opting other people’s quotations from subjects into his own interviews with selfsame subjects, also just plain inventing other quotations from eyewitnesses in war-torn Congo. (Talking of Waugh, these inventions are of a piece of with the Scoop school of foreign correspondence: “barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spread-eagled in the deserted roadway below his window.”)  Hack is also exposed for Internet “sockpuppetry” in the form of adopting an online alias -- “David Rose” -- to inflate his own stature on Wikipedia and accuse his antagonists (real or imagined) of anti-Semitism and homophobia and alcoholism. Twitter becomes the public forum in which the severity of his crimes are weighted, with those adhering to the "no enemies on the left" conceit defending him, and others -- ideological opponents and those who simply value honesty in journalism -- saying, "oh, please." Hack goes into a state of Mahdi-like occultation for several weeks. His career is said to be over, his psychological well-being questioned. Then hack re-emerges in the Independent newspaper, which had launched an investigation into his mischief, seemingly copping to wrongdoing but in fact indulging in buckets of self-pity. Also, he is apparently unsacked by the Independent for lying in print but only made to attend a journalism how-to course at his own expense (justice!) and take a leave of absence for four months.

Here’s Hari's non-apology:

But offering words of apology is not enough. Christopher Hitchens once wrote: “If you don’t want to sound like the Pope, who apologises for everything and for nothing, then your apology should cost you something.” I agree. So first, even though I stand by the articles which won the George Orwell Prize, I am returning it as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews. But this isn’t much, since it has been reported that they are minded to take it away anyway. (I apologise to them for the time they’ve had to spend on this.) So second, I am going to take an unpaid leave of absence from The Independent until 2012, and at my own expense I will be undertaking a programme of journalism training. (I rose very fast in journalism straight from university.) And third, when I return, I will footnote all my articles online and post the audio online of any on-the-record conversations so that everyone can hear them and verify they were said directly to me.

So. An award that was to be rescinded anyway is generously offered up in penance, and the root of the bloomer was that Hari “rose very fast in journalism straight from university” (if he does say so himself) and so never bothered to learn that falsifying what other people, and pseudonymously libeling those you don't like, say is not good practice.

What a revealing few months for the state of British journalism.

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