Johann Hari’s career-long trouble with the truth

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts. 

In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug. 

In a four-part takedown of Hari on X, Rayner questioned how the “bollocks” was able to be published with such a flagrant disregard for fact-checking. A quick Google search would have shown his article in the Guardian explaining why he would never take the drug. 

“He’s now repeating this cobblers in interviews. We know @johannhari101 is a terrible journalist (I use the term loosely). He had to quit a newspaper for making stuff up. But Christ, checking something like this isn’t hard,” Rayner posted. 

Hari issued several more mistruths in his apology to Rayner. “I confused an article by Jay Rayner in the Guardian with an article by Layla Latif in the same paper talking about losing pleasure in food. I apologise to Jay for getting this wrong, & am gutted I & my fact-checkers missed it,” Hari said on X. But Latif, a film critic not a food critic, has also never gotten the Ozempic jab. And by the way, her name is Leila not Layla. 

This isn’t Hari’s first time fabricating a story. In 2011, he was stripped of the prestigious Orwell Prize after his coverage of French military action in the Central African Republic came under scrutiny. Hari had alleged a soldier told him “children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help, but our orders were not to help them.” According to the translator who worked on the story, no one ever said this. Before the incident, Hari had already been caught misattributing quotes from books and other articles as his own original reporting. 

Hari isn’t just a fibber, he’s also petty. Under the pseudonym David Rose, Hari edited Wikipedia pages of his critics in the early 2010s, calling them homophobic, antisemitic and drunkards. Cockburn expects “round-bellied lubber” to pop up on Rayner’s Wikipedia profile any day. 

Despite his unreliable reporting, Hari has somehow become a New York Times bestseller, publishing four books since 2015. It just goes to show what Cockburn has always suspected — a British accent can always help cover a multitude of sins in the American publishing world.