[Kaiserschmarrn]

So it looks like the most famous and successful German journalist in recent years, recipient of domestic and international awards, is a fraud. Der Spiegel published most of his work but other publications also did.

Two things come to mind after having skimmed some of his stories (I'd never read anything from this guy before). Firstly, this is partly caused by the political homogeneity at Der Spiegel which has lead to a lack of bullshit detection and skepticism in the face of stories designed to tap into progressive sensibilities.

Secondly, there's an increasing tendency to have journalists "tell stories" as opposed to reporting facts and events. Most journalists I'm sure don't cross the line into complete fiction as this fraudster did, but it does blur the lines and makes it tempting to, for example, embellish or replace neutral with loaded language. One of the weirder details of this scandal is that many of the Relotius' articles had a certain song playing or people humming or singing a specific melody - as you'd expect in a TV show or film - but this commonality apparently never raised any eyebrows with editors or "fact checkers".

German magazine Der Spiegel says journalist fabricated stories over years

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said on Wednesday it had fired Claas Relotius, an award-winning staff writer, after finding he fabricated and invented facts in many articles in recent years.

“Truth and lie are muddled in his texts,” Der Spiegel said on its website.

Some of the roughly 60 stories Relotius had written since 2011 were accurate but others were “completely invented or embellished with manipulated quotes or other fact-fantasy,” it said.

Among the fabricated stories were articles about a wrongfully detained Guantanamo inmate, about children kidnapped by Islamic State, and about a woman attending the execution of a death sentence as a witness in the United States.

Spiegel said it had immediately terminated his work contract. Relotius, who is 33-years-old and started writing for Der Spiegel in 2011, was not available for comment.

Der Spiegel said Relotius’ senior editors confronted him after a fellow journalist at the magazine voiced suspicions. Relotius then admitted that he had fabricated content a number of articles he had written, it said.

Der Spiegel said the incident marked a “low point in the 70-history” of the magazine and apologized for his actions.

It cited Relotius as saying that at least 14 of the articles he wrote for Spiegel, some of which won awards, did not meet journalistic standards.

“Claas Relotius acted with intent, methodically and with a high level of criminal energy,” Der Spiegel said, adding that he had written about and cited people he had never met or spoken to.
A Tokyo district hangs onto its last sushi stop

Relotius told his editors that “it was not about having the next big thing. It was fear of failing”.

“The pressure not to fail became bigger the more successful I became,” he said, according to Der Spiegel.

Relotius most recently won an award in early December, for a story about a child in war-torn Syria. The German reporters’ association, which handed out the award, said it was “aghast” and “angry” about the news.

Here's a longer account (or damage control) by Der Spiegel.

[One Degree]

Lol. At least 14 articles clearly shows no one ever checked on his stories before publishing. Not surprised.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Der Spiegel's own account linked at the end of my OP is also itself another example of "story telling". It doesn't just report what happened but it almost reads like a murder mystery.

First two paragraphs:

Shortly before the end of his journalistic career, misery and glamor crossed paths in the life of Claas Relotius. On the evening of Monday, Dec. 3, Relotius, who had worked for DER SPIEGEL for seven years and had been employed as an editor for the past year and a half, was called onto a stage in Berlin. The jury for the 2018 German Reporter Prize was once again of the opinion that he had written the best feature story of the year, this one about a Syrian boy who lived with the belief that he had contributed to the country's civil war through a graffito he had daubed onto a wall in Daraa. The jurors praised the article for its "unparalleled lightness, intimacy and relevance that is never silent regarding the sources on which it is based." The truth, however -- a truth that nobody could have known at that point in time -- is that his sources were anything but clear. Indeed, it is likely that much of it was made up. Inventions. Lies. Quotes, places, scenes, characters: All fake.

That misery came in the form of an email, one which, as chance will have it, arrived some 17 hours before the glamor of the awards ceremony, at 3:05 a.m. The message came from a woman named Jan, short for Janet, who was doing media work for a vigilante group in Arizona conducting patrols along the border to Mexico. She asked Relotius -- who two weeks earlier had written an article ostensibly about this vigilante group in the darkly dazzling DER SPIEGEL report "Jaeger's Border" -- what exactly he was up to. How, she wanted to know, could Relotius have written about her group without even bothering to stop by for an interview? She found it very strange, she wrote, that a journalist would write stories without gathering facts locally.

Roletius is obviously the villain, but there's of course a hero in that story too, one who had to overcome many adversities to unearth the truth. It's Moreno, the co-author of Roletius' last story, "Jaeger's Border".

I don't like this kind of reporting anyway most of the time, but that they are recounting their own failure in a "fiction style" really rubs me the wrong way.

[Beren]

He should have been a novelist rather than a journalist, perhaps that's what he actually meant to be.

[B0ycey]

Relotuis should work for Trump. He wouldn’t get fired for fabricating stories then.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Thankfully the NYT is keeping a clear head and immediately goes to the heart of what matters most when it comes to fraudulent journalists: how the right will react.

After German Journalism Scandal, Critics Are ‘Popping the Corks’


The German journalist Claas Relotius holding the trophy he was given after being named journalist of the year by CNN in 2014.

BERLIN — He told the story of a Syrian boy who believed he had helped start the country’s civil war with a prank. He profiled an American woman who traveled around the United States to watch executions. He brought to life, in astoundingly granular detail, the anguish of a would-be suicide bomber in Iraq. Claas Relotius, a star writer at Der Spiegel, Germany’s most respected newsmagazine, won many awards for his reporting on the most important stories of the day. Except, it turns out, much of it was invented.

Der Spiegel fired Mr. Relotius and published a lengthy apology to its readers this week. But the failure of a magazine long considered the leader in Germany for hard-hitting investigations could have cascading consequences for the news media, analysts and senior journalists said. “Spiegelgate,” as it has been dubbed on social media, is one of Germany’s biggest postwar journalism scandals, potentially spanning seven years and many dozens of articles. Coming at a moment when public trust in journalism is already low, it could hardly have arrived at a worse time. Untruths and half-truths circulate liberally on social media platforms, and populists on both sides of the Atlantic have been aggressively trying to discredit and intimidate the mainstream media.

President Trump routinely accuses the media of producing “fake news.” In Germany, members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, describe mainstream outlets as the “Lügenpresse,” or “lying press,” a term used by the Nazis in the 1920s before they rose to power. “It’s a dark day for German journalism,” said Ines Pohl, editor in chief of Deutsche Welle, a publicly funded broadcaster. “For something like this to happen in the heart of Europe is devastating — and just as we’re seeing the attacks on the free press in places like Hungary and Turkey.” “Trump and populists everywhere will be popping the corks," she added.

It did not take long before far-right activists took to social media and reveled in the news. “Der Spiegel, the self-declared standard-bearer that loves to bad-mouth Trump, AfD and others, delivered Fake News for years,” Götz Frömming, an AfD lawmaker, wrote on Twitter. Tino Chrupalla, another AfD lawmaker, wrote on Facebook: “The accusation of the ‘lying press’ is clearly fair in this case.”

The loss of credibility is dangerous at a time when democracy depends more than ever on the ability of journalists to hold power to account, Ms. Pohl said. “Imagine what will happen if tomorrow a Spiegel reporter says he overheard members of the AfD crack anti-Semitic jokes: Who will believe them?” she said. Ullrich Fichtner, who is taking over as one of three editors-in-chief at the Spiegel in January, said the magazine would take a hard look at what went wrong. But he also vowed not to allow the scandal to stop his journalists from conducting aggressive investigations of the powerful. “Yes, journalism is on the defensive, with an economic crisis and with all the attacks on us every day,” Mr. Fichtner said. “But we must not be meek.” Mr. Fichtner said Der Spiegel would appoint a committee to look at its fact-checking and research department, long a proud institution of the magazine. Where improvements can be made, Der Spiegel will make them, he said.

There have been egregious cases of journalistic fabrication before, including those by Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter who resigned in 2003, and Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for an article the paper later determined to be untrue. Der Spiegel described its own scandal as a “low point” in the history of the magazine, which was founded just after World War II. Mr. Relotius, 33, had “committed his deception intentionally, methodically,” inserting into his articles made-up dialogue, people he had never met and “composite characters of people who actually did exist but whose stories Relotius had fabricated,” Der Spiegel said in its apology to readers. He had been writing for the magazine since 2011, and has admitted to making up parts of at least 14 articles in Der Spiegel, the magazine said. But the full extent of his fraud remains unclear. Mr. Relotius wrote almost 60 articles for Der Spiegel, and as a freelancer he also wrote for a variety of other respected German-language newspapers and magazines.

On Thursday, it emerged that he had also faked part of at least two interviews he conducted for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a large daily newspaper based in Munich. His inventions were at times gratuitous and other times breathtaking. In one article he made up an entire telephone interview with the parents of Colin Kaepernick, a former American football player. In another, he invented “Gayle Gaddis,” a religious woman from Missouri whose mission in life was to attend executions across the country. The five-page article was fabricated from beginning to end, Der Spiegel said. The falsehoods in a story about Fergus Falls, Minn., were fact-checked by two local residents. They published their findings on Medium this week under the title “Der Spiegel Journalist Messed With the Wrong Small Town.”

The scandal has prompted a debate about narrative journalism, a genre that has become more popular in recent years and, some argue, has increased the scope for journalistic fraud. “Purists say narrative journalism has blurred the line between providing objective facts and subjective interpretation,” said Carsten Reinemann, a journalism professor at the University of Munich, though he also cautioned against discarding the genre altogether. Mr. Fichtner of Der Spiegel spoke of a “crisis of narrative journalism.” “We have to ask ourselves whether we got carried away in storytelling forms that seduce authors to make the stories better than they already are,” he said. He spoke of his own experience as a judge for journalism awards. “There is a tendency in recent years to make these narrative stories perfect,” he said. “We are looking for seamless plausibility and a density of detail that can be baffling.” Narrative journalism "has to become more humble,” he said. “Because sometimes it might just be too good to be true.”

The article that eventually was Mr. Relotius’s downfall was a beautifully crafted, intimate profile of a border militia in Arizona he had never met. A colleague of his, who co-wrote the story from the other side of the Mexican border, became suspicious. “Relotius’s story ended with a gunshot by the militia men,” Juan Moreno, the colleague, said in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung. But the shot only appeared in the second draft. “When I’m witnessing when someone is shooting at Mexicans I’m not keeping that for my second draft, it’s more likely to be my lede.” There were other elements of the article that did not fit, but when Mr. Moreno alerted Der Spiegel of his suspicions, he was stonewalled initially.

Mr. Relotius was not just a valued reporter. He also put a lot of effort into covering his tracks. He set up fake email accounts from sources to show his editors that he had met them. He asked colleagues to refrain from translating certain pieces into English or posting them online. “With hindsight, there was a pattern, but at the time the pattern was not discernible,” Mr. Fichtner said. “We have a system that was most probably flawed.” But, he added, “we also had a particular perpetrator who was brilliantly exploiting the loop holes in the system.”

He should have been a novelist rather than a journalist, perhaps that's what he actually meant to be.

I also thought he could have had a career in fiction and maybe that's what he's going to do in the future. There are allegations now that he defrauded readers of money by setting up crowdfunding accounts for his fictional protagonists, so he might have to do the writing in a prison cell for a while.

[Negotiator]

Der Spiegel [The Mirror] never did anything else but story telling. They always used the arrogant style of the allknowing story teller in their articles. Thats been true since its earliest days, for over half a century now.

Also I find it funny they're trying to use this case to wash themselves clean. The rest of the same paper, as well as the rest of mainstream press, is deeply corrupt as well. Just alone how often they try to forcefeed us all the time that the fairy tale that Russia is super evil. And how they try to prepare us for a war with Iran now. Just so can have more wars, murder more innocent people and have more "terrorists" to justify their politics.

And for the record, one can lie just as effectively with facts. All you have to do is choose the facts that support your story, and leave the facts that dont out. Bam, instantly you can for example blame Russia for Skripal with completely riddiculous explanations, but ignore the obvious murder of Khashoggi by Saudi Arabias Prince bin Salman.