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Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British writer and journalist. Until 2011, Hari wrote for The Independent, among other outlets, before resigning after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct. He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, the effect of technology on attention span, and anti-obesity medication, which have attracted criticism for inaccuracies and misrepresentation.
He attended the John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with Harrow School, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth form in Finchley. Hari graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.
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. 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.
Hari supported the Iraq War. In 2005, Hari wrote an article in The Independent entitled "Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize", arguing that Harold Pinter, due to a misguided and misinformed anti-imperialist and anti-war stance, should not have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pinter's authorised biographer, Michael Billington, commented that Hari "dismissed Pinter's Lecture in advance of as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler." In 2009, he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on British Left.
Hari initially denied any wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not present someone else's thoughts as his own. However, he later said that his behaviour was "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." Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent and in January 2012 it was announced that he was leaving the newspaper.
The Media Standards Trust instructed the council of the Orwell Prize, who had given their 2008 prize to Hari, to examine the allegations. The council concluded that "the article contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else's story" and did not meet the standards of Orwell Prize-winning journalism. Hari returned the prize, though he did not return the prize money of £2,000. He later offered to repay the sum, but Political Quarterly, which had paid the prize money, 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 when he returned to work at The Independent, but he did not return to work there.
In a 2010 article about military robots, Hari falsely claimed that former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi was attacked by a factory robot and was nearly killed. Hari falsely claimed that a large globe erected for the Copenhagen climate summit was "covered with corporate logos" for McDonald's and Carlsberg Group, with "the Coca-Cola brand ... stamped over Africa." Private Eyes Hackwatch column also suggested that he pretended to have used the drug ecstasy and misrepresented a two-week package tour in Iraq as a one-month research visit, in order to bolster support for the Iraq war by stating that Iraqi civilians he spoke to were in favour of an invasion, although in an earlier article he had given a conflicting account stating that Iraqis were reticent about their opinions.
While Hari was working at the New Statesman, the magazine's deputy editor, Cristina Odone, doubted the authenticity of quotations in a story he wrote. When she asked to see his notebooks, he said that he had lost them. After discovering that Hari had lost a position at the Cambridge student newspaper for allegedly unethical behaviour, Odone went to the magazine’s editor, Peter Wilby, but without result. Odone subsequently found that her Wikipedia entry had been altered by Hari, using his sock puppet account of "David Rose", to falsely accuse her of homophobia and anti-Semitism.
Hari has been accused of misrepresenting writing by George Galloway, Eric Hobsbawm, Nick Cohen and Noam Chomsky.
In July 2011, Cohen wrote about the suspicious Wikipedia editing in The Spectator, prompting the New Statesman journalist David Allen Green to compile evidence that Hari used the fake identity "David Rose" to pretend to be an editor who was qualified in environmental science.
This led to an investigation by the Wikipedia community and "David Rose" was blocked from Wikipedia. Hari published an apology in The Independent, admitting that he had been "David Rose" and writing: "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 apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally."Hari, Johann (14 September 2011). "A personal apology". The Independent.
Due to the previous scandals, Hari put the audio of some interviews conducted for Chasing the Scream online. Writer Jeremy Duns criticised instances where quotes were inaccurately transcribed or misrepresented, stating that out of a sample of dozens of clips, "in almost all cases, words in quotes had been changed or omitted without being noted, often for no apparent purpose, but in several cases to subtly change the narrative." In a review for New Matilda, Michael Brull expressed reservations about Hari's citational practices and highlighted contradictions between the narrative in Chasing the Scream and a 2009 article by Hari.
The journalist Zoe Stavri criticised Lost Connections for a lack of citations for key claims like "between 65 and 80% of people on antidepressants are depressed again within a year", reliance on the work of a single researcher, treating research on a single class of antidepressants as if it applies to all antidepressants, and conflating stress and depression. The psychologist and science writer Stuart Ritchie criticised Hari for repeatedly stating that "between 65 and 80% of people on antidepressants are depressed again within a year" without a clear citation. He traced the source to a pop science book rather than a review of the scientific literature.
As with his previous books, Stolen Focus presents a mix of research, interviews, and first-person narrative. Hari identifies twelve factors which he says contribute to an "attention crisis". Examples include technology addictions such as social media, the increased prevalence of chronic stress, the decline of children's exposure to outdoor play and independent exploration, and the purported influence of ultra-processed foods on brain functions. Hari suggests that Late capitalism's emphasis on profits over human well-being is partly to blame. He criticizes the tech industry for designing products that exploit people to maximize engagement. Stolen Focus also discusses the impacts of sleep deprivation and the lack of opportunities for meaningful work. Hari calls for collective action and suggests a focus on societal changes, rather than personal action.
Psychologist Stuart J. Ritchie criticised Stolen Focus for over-relying on personal anecdotes while failing to cite strong evidence for the existence of shrinking attention spans. The writer Matthew Sweet investigated some of the statements in the book and wrote that Hari had failed to cite the primary sources for some studies, and misrepresented the results of studies that suggested multitasking could have benefits in certain conditions. Sweet called on the publisher to withdraw the book for misinterpreting its sources. Citing
Karlin Lillington, writing for the Irish Times, praised Stolen Focus for being a more accessible companion to Shoshana Zuboff's work on surveillance capitalism, but says Hari sometimes goes too far in reducing complex topics to bullet points.
Magic Pill attracted criticism for inaccuracies. Restaurant critic Jay Rayner criticised Hari for incorrectly stating, in Magic Pill, that Rayner had taken Ozempic (semaglutide), which had "robbed him of his pleasure in food" in even "great restaurants in Paris" as a result. Rayner stated this was "utter bollocks" – he had written in The Observer that he would not take semaglutide, because "being a big man who loves his dinner is a profound part of me." He also did not make any mention of Paris. Writing for The Guardian, Tom Chivers criticised the use of references that did not support the book's claims, as well as scientific inaccuracies. Private Eye magazine criticised Hari's book for what it described as false claims and dubious references.Private Eye magazine #1624, 6 June 2024, page 36 - Literary Review - "Magic Pillock" A fact check by The Daily Telegraph found six examples of "errors, outdated data and disputed claims". Hari said these errors would be corrected in future editions.
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