The Tyranny of "The Good Lie"

Brendan O'Neill writes:

The debate about Johann Hari’s creative interviewing style is now so shot through with sycophancy and schadenfreude, with his media mates defending him on one side and his media critics mocking him on the other, that no one has paused to consider the seriousness of what has happened here. The key problem with Hari’s approach to interviews, and with his justification of it in this morning’s Independent, is that he has deployed the Noble Truth defence – the idea that it is okay to play fast and loose with the facts, and with reality itself, just so long as you end up telling a “greater truth”. The notion that one can reach “the truth” by manipulating reality should be anathema to anyone who calls himself a journalist. The fact that it isn’t, the fact that many hacks have lined up to defend and even cheer Hari, is genuinely shocking.

In his apology in the Independent, which is actually a justification of his behaviour, Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”. He says he has interviewed people who have “messages we desperately need to hear”, “brave” people with “vital messages”, and therefore it is in everyone’s interests that he present those messages in the clearest manner possible. Even if that means fabricating a conversation, making out that Gideon Levy or someone else said something to him which they categorically did not.

This is an extraordinary thing for a journalist to say. What Hari is really arguing is that the message of his journalism, the “truth” that he and his interview subjects apparently want to tell, is so important that embellishment and glorification are justified. This is not only superbly patronising to the reader – who is assumed to be so in need of hearing some liberal’s “vital messages” that those messages can be spoonfed to him in a deceitful fashion – but it also runs contrary to every journalistic ethic. The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.

It is not surprising, however. Because the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter if he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.

The idea of a “good lie” is a dramatically Orwellian device, designed to deceive and to patronise. A lie is a lie, whether your intention is to convince people that Saddam is evil and must be bombed or that Gideon Levy is a brainy and decent bloke. Lying to communicate a “vital message”, a liberal and profound “truth”, is no better than lying in order to justify a war or a law’n'order crackdown or whatever. That more journalists cannot see this, that many of them have instead allowed their personal friendship with Hari to cloud what they think of this affair, is depressing. Why would anyone take seriously the reporting or commentary of people who believe it is acceptable to massage and refashion the facts in the name of telling “The Truth”?