Wow, can the meta-irony of this particular point be any deeper?
Good thing there will always be a job waiting for him at the bakery.
"Following the release of his book, Chasing the Scream, in 2015, Hari gave a number of interviews where he expressed regret for his actions. In order to quell doubts about his reporting, he also released full audio copies of sources he interviewed for his book. In an interview with the Little Atoms podcast, Hari also stated that he would apologise to Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen."[1]
I think the article is exceptionally well-written, personal, and informative, and gave me, as someone intimately involved with all things addiction for 30 years, fresh perspective.
The fact that he seems to be currently deeply in love with an active addict may be motivation behind the piece, but it takes little away from the insights.
Things are significantly more complicated with Hari than "mistake, apology, done". This article recaps the problems and even documents severe problems in his post-apology work.
I'm fine with hiring people who have erred before, if the regret looks real. People make mistakes. They should be able to take a new direction.
But Hari did dishonest reporting for a long time and, as David Allen Green writes, was "smearing other journalists in an on-going systemic manner for years". I will remain suspicious of whatever he does as a reporter.
In a way: his crime was an abuse of words, and I'll be careful whenever he again works with words. If his crime had been abuse of children, I wouldn't mind him working in construction, or even keeping books, but I'd be careful hiring him as schoolteacher.
If he got a job at a bakery, well, I suppose he wouldn't poison anyone, although his work as a reporter was poison.
While we're talking about people who did bad things in the past and got a second chance... How about John Carmack?
> As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to help a group of kids steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of Thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole, and opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. John was arrested, and sent for psychiatric evaluation (the report mentions 'no empathy for other human beings' and describes Carmack as 'a brain on legs'). Carmack was then sentenced to a year in a juvenile home.
Carmack's comments (from 1999):
> I knew I wanted to work with computers from a very early age, but there were also a lot of other stereotypical geek aspects to my life growing up - phreaking, hacking (nobody called it "cracking" back then), rockets, bombs, and thermite (sometimes in not-so-smart combinations), sci-fi, comic books, D&D, arcades, etc.
> I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offence after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly.
> I went to a couple semesters of classes at the University of Missouri (UMKC), taking nothing but CS classes, but it just didn't seem all that worthwhile. In hindsight, I could have gotten more out of it than I did, but I hadn't acquired a really good attitude towards learning from all possible sources yet.
> I dropped-out of college to start programming full time, but trying to do contract programming for the Apple II/IIGS post 1990 was not a good way to make money, and I only wound up with between $1k and $2k a month. Not having enough money is stressful, and I did some things I didn't want to. I wrote a numerology program for a couple hundred bucks one time...
> Softdisk publishing finally convinced me to come down to Shreveport for an interview. I had been doing contract work for Jay Wilbur and Tom Hall, so I knew there were some pretty cool people there, but meeting John Romero and Lane Roath was what convinced me to take the job. Finally meeting a couple sharp programmers that did impressive things and had more experience than I did was great.
> After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).
> I learned a huge amount in a short period of time, and that was probably a turning point for my personality. I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then.
Journalism and computer programming are fundamentally different pursuits. Computer programming is a perfectly objective activity, the output is totally independent of the work that went into it. Thus, Carmack's work is brilliant, and would remains brilliant despite Carmack being a repentant theif. ReiserFS is still a good filesystem and is still included in the Linux kernel, despite it's author being a convicted murderer.
But journalism is different: the activity is subjective and we are required to trust that the journalist (and their editor and publisher etc) isn't out to mislead us (or, more realistically, that we understand their biases and can compensate for them). Thus, the output is much closer linked to the work that went into it. The journalist was in the room, we weren't. We have to trust that the journalist not only accurately quotes what's being said, but accurately represents the context of it. That means that the personal integrity of the journalist is much more important.
Plenty of lapses of journalists can be trivially forgiven - youthful theft easily among them. But Hari didn't steal a computer as a kid, he messed with one of the most sacred institutions of journalism: the quote. Even worse, he claimed ignorance: forgiving a journalist who so fundamentally misunderstands his own role as a high-integrity purveyor of truth that he thinks it's cool to mess with quotes is a lot more difficult than forgiving theft (not that it's up to any of us to forgive Carmack, we weren't party to his crime).
Good thing there will always be a job waiting for him at the bakery.
"Following the release of his book, Chasing the Scream, in 2015, Hari gave a number of interviews where he expressed regret for his actions. In order to quell doubts about his reporting, he also released full audio copies of sources he interviewed for his book. In an interview with the Little Atoms podcast, Hari also stated that he would apologise to Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen."[1]
I think the article is exceptionally well-written, personal, and informative, and gave me, as someone intimately involved with all things addiction for 30 years, fresh perspective.
The fact that he seems to be currently deeply in love with an active addict may be motivation behind the piece, but it takes little away from the insights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari
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