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

12-20-18

The world-renowned German news magazine “Der Spiegel” fired award-winning reporter and editor Claas Relotius admitted to falsifying his articles on a grand scale.

“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.

RT producer Brent Jabbour discusses one of Relotius’s bogus stories, a false profile of “Fergus Falls,” a rural town in flyover country, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

‘Journalist of the Year’ fired in disgrace

RT

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

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.”

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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.

Image

The headquarters of Der Spiegel in Hamburg, Germany.CreditCarsten Koall/EPA, via Shutterstock

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 star.

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’ 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,” said Mr. Fichtner. “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.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin. Alan Yuhas contributed reporting from New York.

New York Times

#CNN #fakenews 

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