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Can this be true?

Really?

What are purported to be interviews are in fact quotations from the interviewees other writings?

Tsk.

9 thoughts on “My Word!”

  1. So Much For Subtlety

    If you want to look the word “conflicted” up in the dictionary, you will find a picture of me contemplating the idea of Hari faking quotes to smear Negri.

    Is there, to paraphrase one of the better posters around here quoting someone else, any way they both can’t lose?

    Suddenly I am dubious about Hari’s other major claim – he likes being f**ked by Neo Nazi boot boys. As not one of them has come forward to admit to such a serious lapse in taste, perhaps we shall have to conclude that was all fantasy too.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/dec/13/gayrights.thefarright

  2. Does that make him a graduate of the the Laurie Penny School of Journalism or is it the other way round?

  3. Interesting to click through the links. Hari’s right that it’s not plagiarism, but it is a form of lying, making himself look good, maybe making the interviewee look good. The description of the encounter is faked, although the description of the interviewee’s views is arguably not (do these people none of them change their view over time? Scary). And do I trust Hari to tell me what I need to know without shaping the message the way he wants? No. Well, I didn’t before, just based on reading him at face value, and you certainly can’t trust someone who misuses quotation marks, present tense and statements of fact. It’s a string of lies.

  4. I had exactly the same experience, writing a letter to the local newspaper only to find selected sentences extracted, put into quote marks and the whole thing published as if they’d actually interviewed me…

  5. A Ratner moment, to be sure. But he always was overhyped, as all columnists who trade on shock are. The real victims are those who believed his finger-steepling pronouncements and thought him some sort of wunderkind, whereas he is just another Liz Jones really.

  6. From Webster’s:

    Definition of PLAGIARIZE

    : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source

    : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
    =======================

    Taking the contents of another’s book and presenting it as your own work seems to fall into this definition.

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