Two jabs from Johann
A look at how Johann Hari sold his scare story about weight-loss drugs to The Daily Mail and Times...
Previously: The resurrection of Johann Hari proves that 'cancellation' is bullshit
(from the archive, September 18 2020)
Johann Hari — plagiarist turned friend of celebrities and purveyor of dubious but polished pop-sci polemics — has a new book coming out. That means he’s all over the newspapers again in promotion mode and it gives us the opportunity to see how the same scare story is sold by The Mail on Sunday and Times in turn.
The Mail feature, published on 20 April, has practically the same headline (‘I lost three stone on Ozempic - but there are risks everyone should know about’) as today’s Times piece (‘I’ve lost three stone taking Ozempic. But am I at risk?’) but the two stories are framed quite differently.
In the Mail on Sunday, Hari discovers the existence of Ozempic at a party “thrown by an Oscar-winning actor” when he comments on how thin the other attendees are and is let in on their weight-loss secret. Recounting his ‘journey’ for The Times, he skips the party talk and pulls out an anecdote about being given a Christmas card by counter staff for being the “best customer” at his local branch of KFC in 2009:
The man behind the counter said, “Johann! We have something for you.” He walked off behind where they fry the chicken and returned with all the other staff who were working that day. Together, they handed me a massive Christmas card. I opened it. They had addressed it, “To our best customer,” and all written personal messages. My heart sank, because I thought, this isn’t even the fried chicken shop I come to the most.Hari first peddled the KFC tale for The Huffington Post in 2010, in a piece where he purported to have learned to quit the chicken chain and take up exercise. Due to inflation, the “large card” handed to Hari in December 2009 becomes “massive” in his new recollection and he adds the punchline about it not even being his favourite chicken shop. In both versions, he stretches credulity by claiming that the card included personal messages from all the staff who applauded him as he received it.
In the Times retelling of his year of injections, Hari jumps straight from that grease-soaked Proustian memory to deciding to try Ozempic, but both articles hinged on his grandfather’s death from a heart attack at 44. They also both feature shifty ways of pretending that Hari wasn’t simply searching for the topic for his next book:
[Mail on Sunday]
So, reluctantly, I decided to try these drugs – paying £300 a month for them privately (although it is available on the NHS) – and at the same time do a deep dive into the science of them, spending a year interviewing over 100 experts and others all over the world, from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo, who told me that we now have a new wave of drugs that produce a staggering amount of long-term weight loss.[The Times]
To investigate this, I spent a year taking these drugs and doing a deep dive into their effects all over the world, from the United States to Japan to Iceland, interviewing more than 100 of the leading experts and others affected by these drugs in different ways. Almost at once, I began to see their power.For Mail readers, he began his quest reluctantly but in The Times, he was decisive. Truly, Hari contains multitudes (even if they’ve been chemically slimmed down). In the Mail on Sunday, he turns away from his usual breakfast at his local cafe, while The Times finds him ordering nothing when he takes his godsons to McDonalds.
In the Mail on Sunday, where Hari concludes he will continue taking the weight-loss drug for the foreseeable future, the question of whether it might lead to depression didn’t make an appearance. For The Times feature, it’s one of the central questions:
It’s possible that these drugs make you eat less, because when you take them, you find lousy food less rewarding. But for me, this begs an obvious question.
If they dial down the rewards you get from eating, could they be dialling down the rewards you get from other activities too?Reflecting the editorial priorities of the different papers, the Mail on Sunday version focuses instead on a ‘won’t someone think of the children?’ angle:
It doesn’t have to be this way for our kids and future generations. There are big changes we could make now to prevent them facing this dilemma, and I saw how they have been put into place in countries such as Japan, where there is little obesity. Curiously, the Mail On Sunday usually the more salacious of the two titles, edits Hari to focus more on comments from scientists he spoke with, while The Times — albeit a paper that’s become increasingly Mail-like in the hands of its editor, former Mail man Tony Gallagher — opts for a more ‘my struggle’ approach.
While Hari tries to graft his personal experience to wider questions…
I could not have predicted at the start that taking Ozempic would send me on this emotional journey. In a similar way, I don’t think that as a society we have begun to properly plan and assess where these drugs are going to take us — though we can begin to see significant hints.… the Times feature, with its images of him lounging around in a suit and sporting a tight white t-shirt like a Aldi middle-aisle James Dean action figure, is solipsistic. Hari can’t help but make himself the hero of all these contrived journeys he goes on. He remains a man who imagines that behind every door there may just be a gaggle of staff waiting to hand him a massive card celebrating his existence.
Please share this edition if you enjoyed it. It really helps.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky and/or TikTok.
If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
It helps and allows me to spend more money on research and reporting. Buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt.