Independent’s Johann Hari apologises over quotes

The award-winning journalist at the centre of a row over interview quotes, Johann Hari, has defended himself in today's Independent newspaper, insisting that accusations of plagiarism were "totally false". But he also apologised for an "error of judgement" and said that he had lessons to learn.

Hari, who has written for the Independent for 10 years, sparked accusations of plagiarism as well as a huge backlash on Twitter yesterday after bloggers spotted recycled quotations in his interviews. It emerged that the Orwell Prize-winning columnist had frequently presented quotes as though they had been spoken to him, when they were actually lifted from previous articles, books or the interviewees' own writings.

In his mea culpa in the Independent Hari denied allegations of "churnalism" - the practice of reproducing second-hand material - but admitted that he did have "something to apologise for".

He wrote: "I've thought carefully about whether I have been wrong here. It's clearly not plagiarism or churnalism – but was it an error in another way? Yes. I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn't do it again."

The plagiarism row began several days ago when a website, the self-described "ultra-leftist" Deterritorial Support Grouppppp (DSG), compared near-identical quotes from a 2004 interview conducted by Hari with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri with a 2003 book, Negri on Negri, by Anne Dufourmantelle.

Another blogger, Brian Whelan, subsequently found a similar example in a interview Hari conducted last year with the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy.

Hari defended his practice on his personal website on Monday night in an article called 'Interview Etiquette'. In the blog post he admitted that he had inserted quotes into interviews in order to make his interviewees appear more articulate. He also claimed that in a decade of interviews he had not received a single complaint from the people he had written about.

Writing in the Independent he insisted: "I did not and never have taken words from another context and twisted them to mean something different."

The controversy provoked such a frenzy on Twitter yesterday that at one point the row became the second most popular subject on the social networking site. Journalists and bloggers attacked Hari and demanded that he return his Orwell Prize, the political journalism award that he won in 2008. Other users jokingly repeated famous lines in history as if reported by the interviewer.

Hari said today that in his interviews he had prioritised "intellectual accuracy" over "reportorial accuracy". But he conceded: "That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn't clear to the reader." ·