User:Atshal/sandbox

Journalistic controversy
During the latter half of 2011, Hari was the centre of two journalistic controversies; he was found to have plagiarized quotes in several of his articles, and was found to have made malicious edits of several of his critics' Wikipedia pages using a sockpuppet account. A combination of both of these controversies led to Hari leaving his position at The Independent.

Plagiarism
In 2011, bloggers DSG (Deterritorial Support Group) and Brian Whelan (editor of Yahoo! Ireland) highlighted potential plagiarism in some of Hari's interviews, by comparing quotes with material from previous interviews by other journalists, and with previous written works by his interview subjects. Subsequently the story was reported in a number of sources in the UK media. Hari defended himself by claiming that that he had used material previously written by interviewees for clarification purposes and that this did not constitute plagiarism. In July 2011, the allegations of plagiarism resulted in Hari being suspended from The Independent "pending investigation" by Andreas Whittam Smith. . Hari later accepted that his behavior did amount to plagiarism in an apology in The Independent, and as a result resolved to undertake a journalism course.

Wikipedia editing
In July 2011, New Statesman legal correspondent David Allen Green wrote on his personal blog that in January 2005 a Wikipedia user had discovered that a Wikipedia editor, David Rose, using the sockpuppet account 'David r from meth productions' shared an IP address with The Independent newspaper. On the same day Nick Cohen in The Spectator wrote that he had been attacked on Wikipedia by David Rose following a dispute with Johann Hari, as had Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone, and Oliver Kamm, the Times leader writer. Cohen also wrote that Hari's own Wikipedia entry had been edited by Rose "to make him seem one of the essential writers of our times".

In September 2011 "David Rose" was shown to be Johann Hari.

Consequences
A combination of the two controversies had serious implications for Hari's career. In addition to leaving The Independent in early 2012 as a result of the scandals, Hari was forced to return the 2008 Orwell prize Orwell Prize, despite claiming that the article he had won the prize for was not plagiarised. In addition, Hari published an apology in The Independent, in which he admitted to both using unattributed quotes from other sources in some of his articles, and making malicious edits to several of his critics' Wikipedia pages. . Since this apology, Hari has published only a single article in the UK press.