Guido has just got off the phone with the Media Standards Trust, a charity “that fosters high standards in news on behalf of the public”. As sponsors of the Orwell Prize they funded the award to Johann Hari of the prestigous prize in 2008. Orwell is the giant of British political writing, the inventor of the Ministry of Truth and creator of Winston Smith who had the job of “rectifying” the past. Johann Hari has done far too much “rectifying” of quotes and facts to have the honour of holding a prize named after Orwell.

The Media Standards Trust tell Guido that procedure has to be followed, that the governance process for the Orwell Prize council involves worthies and due process has to be seen to be done. It is farcical for a charity that aims to foster the highest standards of political journalism, in the name and tradition of Orwell, to have as a recipient of their highest award a journalist who fakes interviews.  George Orwell once wrote “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Johann has been caught deceiving, it is time for them to act…

UPDATE: Guido just spoke on the phone with Hari (like a real journalist, not one who just pretends to interview the sources of his quotes) to ask him “Will you be giving back the Orwell Prize?”. He hesitated for a moment before saying “I have an article in the Independent tomorrow… thank you.” He then put the phone down…

Bleeding-heart socialist Johann Hari has been caught red-handed as a bleedin’ cheat. He has been called out for stealing quotes from a book and pretending he had been told them face to face, adding descriptions of the scene like “with a shake of the head” and “then he says, in a quieter voice”. Brian Whelan the UK Editor of Yahoo! has demolished Hari:

“The quote is sewn together with a string of other ideas Levy may or may not have shared with Hari but at no point does Hari indicate the quotes are taken from elsewhere… While Hari has questions to answer over the quotes he claims were given directly to him he also seems to be freely creating mash-up quotes out of disparate statements levy has made over the years. Not the practice of an award winning hack… If the Indy really did send him to Scotland for these quotes I think Hari’s editor needs to sit him down for a chat.”

Hari has responded saying that he was merely accurately quoting the works of the writer he has interviewing, but his argument falls apart when you look at the other sources of some of the quotes –  interviews with other hacks, that are not referenced or acknowledged. Sod the Orwell Prize, Hari can add The Stephen Glass Award 2011 to his already cluttered mantelpiece.

UPDATE: Guido sat down for a quiet chat with Johann this morning. He said pensively “I have become the Nadine Dorries of the commentariat, though it is 70% made-up with me.”

UPDATE II: This from August 2010 is worth re-reading: Johann Hari is a liar

There is a lot of speculation, most of it horrified, that Rod Liddle is being lined up to take over the editorship of the Indy by  Lebedev.  Back in May last year Guido advanced two ideas to save the Indy.  The first was abandon the loss making print edition and go all digital.  The second was to seize the

glaring broadsheet market positioning gap … by shifting from an editorial stance that reluctantly backs the LibDems towards enthusiastically backing Cameron’s liberal conservativism. With the Telegraph floundering editorially the Indy is never going to capture the ground held by the Guardianistas. The Times is probably going to row in behind Cameron with a heavy dose of skepticism from Murdoch. The Indy should therefore enthusiastically embrace the socially liberal Notting Hill Cameroons, in all their weed tolerating, groovy green glory. Become the modernised news brand that Cameroons are not embarrassed to be supported by…

Rod Liddle is not the man to do that Mr Lebedev. If you are looking for an editor to move the Indy from the Guardian dominated liberal-left space to the market opportunity on the liberal-right, there is one perfect candidate available.  The Indy could become the Cameroon’s house-paper with the inside track on the next government if the editor was Matthew d’Ancona.  Go for it…

Remember Guido’s Plan to Save the Indy?

Well they have gone half way towards the concept.  They have released an iPhone app that allows you to read the paper offline.  Handy for people getting on the tube.  Just launch the app when you brush your teeth.  By the time you finish in the bathroom the paper will be uploaded to your iPhone for you to read on the underground.  Now all they have to do is abandon slaughtering trees for an unprofitable print edition and they could be on the way to profitablity.

Since clearly the Indy people read Guido; can we have a Blackberry version?  Please.

Yesterday we learnt that The Times and Sunday Times are losing a million pounds a week.  The New York Times is selling and renting back its own headquarters to stay solvent.  Guardian Media Group is losing £83,000 a day and has axed over a hundred jobs.  The Indy’s bonds now have junk status edging over defaulting.  The Indy is in  the weakest position, it loses money hand over fist, it always has and will continue to do so for as long as it is in the expensive business of publishing dead trees. The newspaper industry is a dead industry walking. It is not a twenty-first century business model: slaughter half a forest of trees, pay NUJ rates for news gathering, sub-editing, laying out, employing friend’s children, transferring ink onto aforesaid trees, then pay people to work all night sending the slices of dead trees around the country in the dark on lorries. Finally when you get to the point of collecting some money, split the sales revenue with the people who take the money. The Indy makes a loss on the whole business every year. That is vanity publishing.

Guido finds it hard to believe that traditional newspapers have a future, yet a surprising number of mediasaurs do continue to stick their heads in the sand.  Warren Buffet says the internet will kill newspapers.  Would you bet against him?

A back of an envelope calculation suggests that the Indy could abandon the printed edition to go digital only and, for some £20 million, give everyone of its 215,000 average daily readers an Amazon Kindle or iPhone type device.  Users would be given the device free with access to the Indy site hardwired in.  Users would only be charged for using the device to surf other sites.  Crazy?  What is crazy is that as things stand the Indy hardly covers the cost of production and distribution.  As circulation shrinks the fixed costs associated with producing a newspaper are becoming terminal.  The INM annual financial report is not that transparent,  nevertheless Guido reckons the paper is not even covering operating, production and distribution costs as things stand – never mind servicing the corporate debts.  Going digital will take it out of the costly tree slaughtering business and make it a content producing pure play.  Will advertisers go for it?  They are already migrating from ink to pixels.

Guido has one more suggestion; there is a glaring broadsheet market positioning gap to be seized by shifting from an editorial stance that reluctantly backs the LibDems towards enthusiastically backing Cameron’s liberal conservativism. With the Telegraph floundering editorially there is a market opportunity.  The Indy is never going to capture the ground held by the Guardianistas. The Times is probably going to row in behind Cameron with a heavy dose of skepticism from Murdoch. The Indy should therefore enthusiastically embrace the socially liberal Notting Hill Cameroons, in all their weed tolerating, groovy green glory. Become the modernised news brand that Cameroons are not embarrassed to be supported by…

• Dan Hannan in the Telegraph is derisory about the Indy’s misinformation.
• Roy Greenslade in his widely read (by hacks) Guardian blog returns to the issue for a second time.
• James Forsyth over at the Speccie’s CoffeeHouse wonders “What would The Independent say if another newspaper had done the same on Iraq?”
• Iain Dale doesn’t think this over yet. “Not by a long way.” Nor does Guido.
• Melanie Phillips thinks Indy-gate “a practice associated with the unfree press in totalitarian societies. Once again, the blogosphere has shown its power to hold the mainstream media sharply to account and inflict real damage to its reputation.”

The newspaper’s readers surely deserve to know the truth. Is it now the editorial policy of the Independent to reprint lengthy government press releases word-for-word if Andy Grice* agrees with them? Shouldn’t the Indy flag up when it is re-printing government press releases - “This information was supplied by the government, we are reprinting it in its entirety on the front page because we agree with it.” Perhaps a little “Government Approved” logo would suffice?

*According to Simon Kelner “what we printed was a collection of facts, which our political editor independently verified.”