Der Spiegel published around 60 stories from a fraudster
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
Sure, it's good you unveiled that. But in your article you're writing yourself how the first colleague to suspect something was stone-walled, had to fear for his job, got no support from superiors and investigated on his own money.
Maybe tone it down a bit.
Remember the Schulz-train "phenomenon" suddenly emerging last year? I stumbled upon it the first on spon and I am convinced they basically just invented it. And I am saying that as somebody voting for SPD.
Ideally just news, or news in context but no unbalanced editorials, opinion pieces or political or social agenda. It is the last one I am struggling with finding.
Also no cheap drama, preferably being positive in general.
No popular science, too.
Not shallow.
Also, the list above lacks the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) as a source for high-quality journalism (politically, I would describe the FAZ as open-minded conservative.)
It's the first time I've actually seen them included in any list of reputable media.
Spiegel, ZEIT, sueddeutsche, Tagesschau, and FAZ are the large, reputable, online publishers. If you want to watch, tagesthemen is I believe among the best-produced daily news in both German and English language.
Spiegel (the magazine) is distinct from Spiegel Online, and is only available for paying customers. Do read through one–I'm sure there's a free trial or a pdf you can find somewhere. It's mostly medium-length and some long-form, deeply reported stories, current events none-withstanding.
All of these are essentially mainstream, politically, with FAZ tending centre-right, tagesschau going to great length to appear neutral, and the rest being centre-left, somewhere right of The Guardian, left of The Economist.
FAZ und NZZ are mostly neutral, slightly conservative (but not in the US sense). I'd recommend them.
A broadcast service for promoting the language and culture to an international audience. A bit like "Voice of America". DW is financed by public funds that was allocated on the state level (ARD).
The have offerings such as a "slowly spoken news with transcript" podcast, in German language.
I cannot help getting the impression that the Spiegel employees perceive themselves as some kind of high priests of democracy, and what Relotius did was not only high treason, but blasphemy. Sure, responsible journalism is important for any healthy society, but a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - common practice. Additionally, as others have mentioned, calling the "Spiegel" a defender of high-quality journalism would've been true 20 years ago, but today is quite a stretch.
Relotius may have massively overdone it, but come on - the guy visited a high security prison in Kurdistan to interview someone, so at least try to be fair.
I meant the prison visit as an example that not everything was fabricated by him. It wasn't like he sat down on a desk in Hamburg and started dreaming out interviews, at least that is my understanding (which may be wrong, of course). For example, in one case, he did Skype interviews, received a list of images made by the other party, and then, instead of describing these images, just wrote about them as a smartphone video which may not exist in reality (the article wasn't sure). In another case, he closed an interview with a description of the person praying, which was a fabrication (he admitted that) or described background music (which I thought was really strange) that was not playing in reality. In other cases, he invented background information on people he described, or minor characters in the story. I would be very surprised if you weren't able to find misconduct like this (on a smaller scale, of course) in any journalist's life work.
I find it respectable that it was the Spiegel who pointed out the issue, but I am convinced that ridiculing and publicly destroying Relotius like that was a mistake and will drive a lot of readers away.
It's not about the "damage" to the end user, i.e. the reader. It's about the complete betrayal of professional ethics. To use a tech analogy, consider a user whose credit card number has been compromised. To the user, the damage is the same whether the info was compromised by the sysadmin's failure to prevent a trivial SQL injection attack, or if the sysadmin decided to use their admin privileges to access and share the info of that user to fuck with them. The former sysadmin can learn their lesson and be redeemed -- the latter case is someone I would most likely never trust with admin privileges.
I do agree that the way someone can spin a story can be just as misleading and dishonest and wholesale making up facts. The practical matter is that it’s much easier to know that someone made up certain facts maliciously. Whereas whether something is maliciously spun vs. “telling it as it is” is harder to define.
But if a journalist is capable of malice in the former, they most certainly do the latter.
When you compound that with journalist's traditional role as the mouthpieces of various political and state organs, their own personal biases, career interests, and organized media management strategies - well, it's really a testament to the good faith that reporters bring to the table that the news cycle is even within spitting distance of the facts.
I don't think malice is the problem. I think the news, as an institution, was never intended to accurately report the events, is structurally incapable of doing so, and so, shouldn't be expected to. Hysterics over a reporter 'making stuff up' is more a defensive thing on the part of journalists, since the foundational conceit of the whole profession, and its defining contradiction, is between their obvious political role, and their equally obvious reliance on being perceived as fact-oriented.
I mean, this is Der Spiegel. It's hardly great journalism. Outsiders shouldn't take this kind of hand-wringing too seriously.
> It wasn't like he sat down on a desk in Hamburg and started dreaming out interviews,
Seems that he sat in Fergus Falls and started dreaming out interviews.
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
For a serious newspaper, new magazine, TV news show, etc. that's purporting to report a news story absolutely not. For example, the Boston Globe has suspended or fired columnists over the years who were found to have fabricated some facts in their columns.
That said, the context does matter. Certainly there's no shortage of books based on some experience of the author's that merge characters and otherwise make changes to improve the narrative flow. But these aren't presented as reporting.
[1] https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
I only read half of the top story which has more than 6500 words. Most of it is written in a style as if it was breaking news about Relotius and not about DER SPIEGEL. They are almost self-congratulatory that they caught a fraudster.
Where there is a hint of self-criticism they don't fail to shrug it off with lame excuses:
> DER SPIEGEL will appoint a commission [...] to avoid that this will happen again. It cannot be avoided, even with the best of intentions. Journalism is, like everything else, to borrow a word from Heinrich von Kleist, subject to the "frailness of the world". And the human being who is engaged in journalism will always be and remain fallible. [1]
Yes, the "frailness of the world" is to blame. Got it.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/fall-claas-relotiu...
> DER SPIEGEL wird eine Kommission berufen [...] um Wiederholungsfälle zu vermeiden. Ausschließen lassen sie sich, auch bei bestem Willen, nicht. Der Journalismus unterliegt, wie alles, um ein Wort von Heinrich von Kleist zu leihen, der "Gebrechlichkeit der Welt". Und auch der Mensch, der Journalismus treibt, wird immer fehlbar sein und bleiben.
> Yes, the "frailness of the world" is to blame. Got it.
People are flawed. Der Spiegel could send pairs on every assignment, but the problem would still exist. What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?
> What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?
First step would be to admit that they have an institutional problem. Blaming a single individual and the "frailness of the world" is not a step in the right direction to prevent this from happening in the future.
Re. Class Relotius: It would be meaningless if der Spiegel were to print "we have an institutional problem, and we will fix it" without identifying what the problem and remedy is. A single bad actor falsifying stories, who is then almost-immediately fired and publically shamed by dem Spiegel, who then start an investigation, whose results will be made public, isn't indicative of any larger organizantional problems. I'm not aware of any way they can stop this happening. They have a team of fact-checkers, but there is only so much they can do. If there is an obvious solution, then criticism of the Spiegel's handling of the situation is warranted. Otherwise not.
The last thing we want to do is punish Der Spiegel for coming out with this information as it would only disincentivize them and other newspapers from doing so in the future.
For example, last month, the Houston Chronicle hired an outside journalist to review 744 stories spanning 4 years after a reporter resigned in response to allegations: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/article/Following-inv...
This guy was able to do his thing for way too long - this says a lot about how "careful" journalism is produced there.
Their coverage today was also about as extensive as, say, 9/11. They could easily gotten ahead of it by releasing just one story, somewhere below the fold.
They also published at noon, their busiest time of the day (people checking the news during their break). On a Wednesday. Release it Friday or Saturday evening (i. e. "Take out the trash day") and far fewer people will see it.
They published at noon because its a big story that geta them clicks, and was crafted to put them in a better light than 'massive lack of basic oversight and fact checking' which sounds bad, because it is.
Seems crazy that such an important and far reaching news story ends up... basically just nowhere.
I understand that Apple is bullish about there not being any evidence of their current hardware being compromised but it seems to me like it doesn't prove it never ever happened anywhere.
You don't have to.
From the very first sentence of that article: "... an outside investigations firm had found no evidence of any malicious hardware in its current or older-model motherboards."
Cause if there was indeed "backdoored motherboard", it'd be very easy to produce the said device and say "Look!".
I recommend DeepL for translation:
Here are some nuggets, although I cannot do the original justice:
He fabricated impossible-to-verify "facts", such as quotes or other, often tangential, factoids
Many times, some eerily apt song was somehow involved (playing on the radio, sung by passing child etc). They write it's impossible to miss if you read all his stories at once, but wasn't noticed in the normal, daily flow with sometimes months passing between stories
He was caught by a colleague sharing a byline on the US/Mexico border. He survived a first round of accusation by being very convincing, but the colleague used a trip to the US to collect incriminating information that was impossible to dismiss. There was apparently lots of scepticism of the accuser, which they openly admit.
The SPIEGEL has 60 fact-checkers, but they have not had the mandate to search for intentional, bad-faith acts such as this. The reasoning is(/was) that fact-checking involves a lot of cooperation requiring trust, and that relationship would be destroyed by a fundamentally adversarial model.
Every single fact that can be checked, is. For one (weekly) issue, they counted 1,000 edits made in this process (with about half of them being stylistic, typos, etc.). Examples they give:
- "<Whatevertown> is a sleepy city of 2,446, an hour outside of Memphis" => They check the distance on Google maps, the headcount in US government data. They don't check the sleepiness.
They would "not investigate the journalist, but only their story". An example for what they don't do is checking rental car bills and if they fit the places the journalist claims to have visited (see above for reasoning)
If you want to help me do some sleuthing, I have a question: In one article, he portraits an American woman and describes a scene where she supposedly "locked her front door, turning the key three times". From my time in the US, I seem to remember door locks having a mechanism somewhat different than they have in Germany, namely one where it would not be possible (or increase security) to make three full turns of the key. IIRC, a second turn would actually unlock the door?
[1] http://www.locksmithsecurityservices.com/2016/06/top-5-lock-...
Locking knobs are a bit different, in that some have a deadbolt function, but most just lock-up the knob itself (to prevent turning). Regardless, these aren't often used as the primary means of securing an exterior door - there's almost always a deadbolt.
>Many times, some eerily apt song was somehow involved (playing on the radio, sung by passing child etc). They write it's impossible to miss if you read all his stories at once, but wasn't noticed in the normal, daily flow with sometimes months passing between stories
This kind of tangental factoid reminds me of people who tweet things like "My 8 year old just asked me..." - everyone knows they are fabricating it but the stakes are so low it ends up being a joke, which evolved into the "woke toddler" meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/woke-toddler
I call it "cheap contextualization". It's rampant with journalists on Twitter who are not limited by their editors.
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
The key is that access to really great international stories is super hard for journalists from smaller markets. They benefit though from publishing their stuff in local language, so no one notices. I bet that there is far more of this going on, this guy just got too big due to his awards.
Audiences in local markets thirst for bigger than life stories, in local language. Simply translating NYT does not work.
Whenever you read articles that mimic a very literary, prosaic style I'd be very careful. All those young journos read David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson, plus all the great Pulitzer pieces. But, then they sit somewhere in boring Middle-Germany and either a) write boring local stuff or b) make up grandiose stories.
Note that this has a long tradition in Germany, starting with famous author Karl May, who wrote legendary adventure books about the Wild West and the Orient - while never leaving Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May). Those books were written in a style suggesting being travel diaries, making a lot of readers believe in him being a real protagonist.
It's unfair to malign smaller market journalists. Some, and I bet not few, journalists go into this profession to be propagandists for their cause, whatever it is.
This rules out whole newspapers like ‘Zeit’. Also ‘Spiegel’ is known for its special style.
I am Austrian. The German speaking world is not the center of the universe, it is provincial.
Hmm. The wikipedia article you linked describes him traveling to Sumatra, Egypt and North America.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiege...
I did find on Twitter someone from Fergus Fall, MN, blogging a response to a feature story by Relotius, a story purportedly about Trump's America. The list of complaints seems quite convincing:
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
An example of an allegedly-fabricated fact:
> Perhaps the oddest fiction in a list of many is Relotius’ depiction of Bremseth as someone who “would like to marry soon…but he has not yet been in a serious relationship with a woman. He has also never been to the ocean.”
> We can attest that Bremseth has indeed been to the ocean, by his account, “many times” and is currently happily involved in a multi-year, cohabitational relationship with a woman named Amanda. In fact, here’s a picture of the two of them in front of, all things, an ocean.
It makes me think of this lady's TED talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg, and how that journalist [wait why am I referring to him as a journalist, he's a fraudster], how that fraudster is just making up his own story and presenting it as the truth, painting a an imaginary world for his readers' minds which they would accept as reality.
Sadly that's what lazy journalism and fake newsmakers do as well, so much that some people are convinced of the existence of FEMA death squads and a child porn ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant...
The obvious "duh" narrative is that everyone in Fergus Fall is a multiple-gun-toting, sex-repressed hillbilly who wouldn't know the difference between or even the existence of Germany and Russia. Such a caricature is more "viral"/tweetable. But if you as a journalist wanted to raise the alarm about the rise of Trumpism, the far more disturbing story would be one depicting Fergus Falls as the "normal" and non-extreme place that it ostensibly is. Because that would imply the scenario of the "good German", where people are uncaring of the purported evil until it's too late.
That the Der Spiegel reporter went for fabricating schlock is, to me, indicative not just of his total lack of ethics, but also shallowness of thought, though maybe the two things are highly correlated.
The caricature in everyone's mind is also dangerous, a lot of Trump "haters" probably just think the average Trump voter is a racist, gun-toting hillbilly. They don't want to further consider e.g. why people who voted for Obama would switch to vote for Trump.
And how many people's image of "Muslim refugee" is immediately "ISIS fighter"?
The same thing is happening with the rise of the populist right in Europe, these are people feeling economically insecure about the future (thanks to, among other things, Merkel's austerity policies as the de-facto leader of Europe), they're confused, the right is exploiting this fear to get them mad, and the left don't bother listening to them and dismiss them as racists, and think the answer is posters promoting tolerance...
A very good film Shattered Glass was made about it.
Not that Blair's misdeeds didn't deserve the same punishment and gnashing of teeth by the NYT -- any fabrication deserves the career death penalty IMHO. But he was caught on his way to becoming someone of Glass's stature. What I remember most about the NYT's investigation/reflection into Blair was how he made up quotes/details regarding real-life people -- and how none of those people apparently complained (loudly enough) to the NYT. Apparently, they thought it was just par for course, which is a hugely damning and depressing indictment of journalism at large:
> In an article on March 27 that carried a dateline from Palestine, W.Va., Mr. Blair wrote that Private Lynch's father, Gregory Lynch Sr., ''choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.'' The porch overlooks no such thing.
> He also wrote that Private Lynch's family had a long history of military service; it does not, family members said. He wrote that their home was on a hilltop; it is in a valley. And he wrote that Ms. Lynch's brother was in the West Virginia National Guard; he is in the Army.
> The article astonished the Lynch family and friends, said Brandi Lynch, Jessica's sister. ''We were joking about the tobacco fields and the cattle.'' Asked why no one in the family called to complain about the many errors, she said, ''We just figured it was going to be a one-time thing.''
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-...
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/chemnitz-chronologie-der-a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD_ZdP79O84&t=2m
Hooligans salute Hitler, AfD supporters and "concerned citizens" go "tee-hee, how bold". That's the AfD, and that's what matters.
edit: oh, and the harmless image that's spread here on HN, combined with silent downvotes, that's just great. If you don't want a response, don't belittle a party you apparently know nothing about, in a country you don't even speak the language of.
> And it came out by a US border militia report. I count the hours till it will be picked up by the US political system. DER SPIEGEL is not exactly a conservative magazine.
This observation is true, it's also important -- the very story itself is political, in just the kind of stories that were fabricated. Or maybe the list is cherry picked I don't know, but going by what I see, politics is already part and parcel of this anyway.
If people then on top of that make observations about a country they don't seem to really know much about, I think it's fair enough to correct them. To say nothing is conservative in Germany compared to US standards is like saying in Japan, all people love cartoons, and watch cartoons instead of reading books.
As but two examples: the last two chancellors and SPIEGEL are essentially identical on the ideological scale: Merkel is slightly left of her center-right party. Schröder was slightly right of his centre-left party. The SPIEGEL is squarely in the mainstream, possibly a bit to the left on social issues than on economics.
Being hated by people in power from both sides of the political spectrum sounds like a mark of honor for a journalist.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case-answer...