Johann Hari suspended by Indy as accusations mount

While the Murdoch press has been grabbing all the headlines in the phone hacking scandal, another, less-reported, controversy over the ethics of British journalism came to a head yesterday as Johann Hari was suspended by the Independent for two months.  

Hari's suspension follows the Independent's decision to launch an internal inquiry, headed by founding editor Andreas Whittam Smith, into two main accusations levelled at the interviewer and columnist over the past fortnight.

The first claim, as the Independent reported yesterday, is that Hari "embellished his articles with quotes that were made on separate occasions". Last month a number of bloggers drew attention to the remarkable similarity between what Hari said interviewees told him in conversation and what those same interviewees had said in previous articles or their own books.

Facing mounting pressure, Hari publicly admitted that he had "something to apologise for", saying it "was wrong" to have added quotes from other sources into his interview articles. He did, however, deny the accusation of plagiarism.

The second claim, surfacing last week, is that Hari used an online alias to attack fellow journalists who criticised him. Both Nick Cohen, in his Spectator diary, and the Telegraph's Cristina Odone have noted the strange coincidence that shortly after disputes with Hari, a mysterious user named 'David r from Meth Productions' made negative changes to their Wikipedia pages. The changes often cited or praised Hari. Furthermore, according to one blogger, David R was operating an Independent computer.

If the second allegation is proven, it comes in stark contrast to the emotional defence of free speech Hari gave just last week when he told an audience at the Royal Institution: "The real test of free speech is not if you support it when everyone is saying you're great, but if you support it when people are saying something painful and humiliating about you."

He continued: "It's only if people are free to point out your mistakes and to do so aggressively and loudly and with laughter that you learn to get it right." ·