I'm really rather sorry to jump into the clamour over Johann Hari's sin against journalistic truth. In the various broadcasting gigs which we have shared I have always found him an engaging interlocutor and (I hope this doesn't sound patronising) a sweet person.
But this is too important a matter: what has to be said – and from what I can see has not been noted thus far – is that what Hari did had very serious intellectual and political implications. Many, if not most, of his interviewees were people whom he admired and whose political views he shared. By replacing what he admits were often their less-than-articulate responses to live questions with text from their published works, he was performing a service to their reputations which was worthy of a spin doctor or a professional propagandist.
If famous or even legendary figures prove to be disappointing in the flesh – unable to present their arguments in the full, impressive form which their books, lectures or formal speeches would lead their admirers to expect – then that is a very important thing for us to know. It is one of the functions of a journalistic interview to make such a discrepancy clear. Only in that way may we come to suspect that the person in question employs, say, a team of ghost writers or a cohort of spokesmen who are contributing to a fictitious or overblown public reputation. To offer quotes from previously composed (and possibly edited) texts as if they were spontaneous conversational replies is to connive in the kind of deception that is routine in totalitarian societies where the Great Leader must always be presented in the best possible light.
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