Play it again, Johann

I see my colleague Johann Hari has been the subject of a Twitter campaign accusing him of plagiarism on the grounds that quotes he attributed to people he interviewed could be found in almost form in earlier interviews, or in their published work. Johann, I’m sure, is perfectly capable of defending himself, but anyone who has ever actually conducted interviews or attended discussion will surely smell a rat.

Unless they are deliberately malicious, the accusations on Twitter are extraordinarily naive. I have interviewed many writers, chaired literary discussions, organised countless speaker events and attended more literary festivals than I can remember. I have heard the same writers discuss their work on several separate occasion and, do you know what, they tend to say the same things they have said before. Often in almost exactly the same form of words.

Is that surprising? Hardly. Don’t we all have our conversational tropes, our party pieces, which we trot out time and again? If you’ve got a good riff, play it again…

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• peterthepoofter

  Yes but he’s never going to conduct another interview for the Indy ever again now, is he?

• michaelwallacereid

  Speaking
  as a gay man who only buys the Indie on Saturday, with freebies on
  infrequent train trips, I do read responses to Mr. Hari’s to articles
  from the previous week. They are usually negative.

  Going
  back to the original paper (15 years ago) he did appear to have an
  independent voice; recently the ’star’ column may have got to his
  head.

  While
  I have no connection to the media I am aware that agendas may be
  persuaded on the opinion pages, while facts are stated outside of the
  op-ed features. On this basis I do believe that Mr. Hari has misled.
  The paper must consider, carefully, if they can retain creditability
  when they continue to employ somebody who has lifted the work (and
  intellect) of fellow journalists in his own pursuit of personal
  glory.

  M.