Only tangentially related but do we have any recent update on the situation with Bloomberg's "backdoored motherboard" story? Last I heard Apple was vehemently asking for them to retract the story but I haven't heard anything after that. Have there been new developments?
Seems crazy that such an important and far reaching news story ends up... basically just nowhere.
At this point, I'd bet that the story will just fade away. Bloomberg's editors obviously think that they have credible sources for the story but they can't reveal who they are. The various hardware vendors are obviously equally convinced that the story isn't true. It seems unlikely that either group are going to change their minds.
No update as far as I know. One would hope Bloomberg has re-checked what they have, but without them or their source revealing more details impossible to verify.
I don't know why I should trust Super Micro investigating Super Micro.
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.
The onus isn't on Apple or Super Micro to prove anything (though it may make business sense to do so). The onus is on the ones making the astounding claim. So far they have produced no motherboard showing evidence of this type of tampering. All it would take is one motherboard that shows the issue. Until then, there's no reason to believe the story.
> I don't know why I should trust Super Micro investigating Super Micro.
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."
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.
They are. But even they wouldn't ban abortion, charge for universities or massively cut down on social welfare or allow anyone to buy assault rifles, right?
Yes, that is right. Although there is this wing in the party, too. The libertarian wing (Alice Weidel) as well as the christian fundamentalist (Beatrix von Storch).
Banning abortion, or at least severely restricting it, is actually one of their stated goals. They also have some "gun enthusiasts". Just today, a scandal hit the papers of an AfD member of parliament participating in a South African right-wing militia's gun training camp (paying with public funds).
Their position on welfare is ambiguous, in actually quite a Trumpian manner: they do profess a wish to care for (white, male) pensioners, for example. But they also regularly rail against "welfare queens", or criminals receiving welfare after release. And of course any use of public funds for people with skin color different from their approved list of Pantone 343 "off-white" to 542 "brown(-ish), but only because I just got back from three weeks on the beach, I swear".
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.
AfD policies would be considered as "too liberal" by the core Trump supporters. After all, the leader of their party is a woman, that lives in foreign country, married to another woman, that is south asian.
What do you want to discuss here, then? What could you be interested in about this story if politics is a no go for you?
> 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.
DER SPIEGEL has a tradition of left and right-wing reporting alongside, but always critical of the people in power. Spiegel‘s founder Rudolf Augstein is famous for his proverb „Im Zweifel links“, though — which translate to: „When in doubt: left-leaning.“
That's an excellent description. It's quite a feat how I think every single chancellor ended up hating them with a passion, especially considering there weren't any Chancellors after the first with much of any real ideological differences to the SPIEGEL.
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.
Text auto-translation has come a long way, this is seriously impressive. It completely re-arranges sentence structure to make it read right in English.
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.
Sabrina Erdely wrote for perhaps the biggest market in the world, with near complete freedom to choose where and what to report.
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.
Erdely wasn't accused of fabricating stories/sources, AFAIK. She was found to have been too trusting and sloppy in her reporting about someone who herself was fabricating stories.
Yes, you can still be liable for defamation when printing a false story, e.g. reckless disregard/negligence of the facts. My comment was that Erderly's failure/transgression was not one of fabrication. Doesn't change the damage of her reporting though.
German is hardly a tiny little local language. Yes it’s not English or Chinese, but it’s big enough (as is Der Spiegel) that you can’t blame fraud on language barriers...
The mechanism OP posits, and which SPIEGEL actually mentions in their reporting, is that subjects would tend to ignore these stories because they either did not notice them due to the language barrier, or did not much care about them due to their unfamiliarity of SPIEGEL and its low importance for the US market.
Karl May's lifetime ended in 1912. I'm not an expert on German history, but I can't imagine he was the very first German author to have fanciful tales, nor does it mean that Germany has a journalistic tradition of wholesale fabrication, compared to other countries/cultures. Joseph Pulitzer lived that same timespan and he was one of the main creators of "yellow journalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer
Stephen Glass seems like the better comparison. Jayson Blair was definitely a massive and traumatic blow to the NYT, which called it a "low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper" [0]. But his fabrications, numerous as they were, were relatively picayune, and he was still a cub reporter career-wise. Der Spiegel's reporter, in contrast, seems to have had international accolades and was promoted to editor-status, and was trusted to write important/dramatic features concerning international affairs. Similar to Stephen Glass, which is why "Shattered Glass" was so entertaining.
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.''
Good on Der Spiegel for bringing this into the light. This happens in journalism and the best thing we can do is encourage this kind of truthfulness on the part of Der Spiegel.
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.
It's impossible to imagine Der Spiegel or any mainstream publication not doing a thorough explanation (and investigation) into allegations this egregious. Even in today's reality of eviscerated local journalism budgets, regional/local outlets still finance and publish investigations when a journalist has confessed to being a fabricator or plagiarist.
I think they just realized that this will surface sooner or later anyway and it will be very, very humiliating and embarrassing when this happens on a rivaling outlet like sueddeutsche.de.
This guy was able to do his thing for way too long - this says a lot about how "careful" journalism is produced there.
Why not just assume good faith for a change? It's also more plausible: both the guy and the publisher would have had an interest in keeping this secret, giving the prospect far better chances than you're suggesting.
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.
It is literally their core job to gather data/stories, fact check and publish things. To get one or more wrong is not inexcusable, but its close.
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.
It's too bad their main story on this isn't available in translation. It is, ironically, one of the most thrilling stories I've read in a while.
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?
Most US locks are Schlage or kwikset (personal experience, but backed by [1]) - both require only a single turn and are direct locking - turn to the left locks, to the right unlocks, if it's already in the position you're trying to set it will only do a quarter turn, and the key must be in the upright position to remove. I would be very surprised to encounter a European style lock, but it may be that some regions prefer them (I'm in the northwest, having previously lived in the east coast metroplex)
My experience is the same - door deadbolts are as you describe.
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.
>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
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.
The original German article is a bit too self-congratulatory for my taste. It's basically "we've got great, ethical journalists, a fantastic documentation department, and despite industry-leading defenses we were defrauded by him. Oh, did we mention how great we are?".
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.
I don't think they're even half aware of the awful consequences this will have. "Reichsbürger" and assorted "fake news" enthusiasts basically have been handed all they need from here on out -- like pouring some kind of synthetic super fuel on a fire we weren't able to deal with as is.
Trust on the press by the public is in a (slow) free fall, personally I think the Lügenpresse has their days counted. It's one of the few good things of the social network era, they can't get away with their lies.
If a magazine disclosing it was fooled by one of its journalists makes anyone believe they live in the year 1935 and the illuminati are coming for their strategic tin-foil reserves then it's still not the media's fault.
As a German I have to say that Spiegel and spiegel.de aren't good journalism outlets and haven't been since many years ago. If I want well made journalism with actual investigative activities I'll resort to sueddeutsche.de, correctiv.org or nzz.ch.
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.
Since I am trying to not let my German become too rusty, what would you recommend as a German news source that is somewhat free of a political agenda, so not leaning to the right or to the left too much?
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.
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.)
That's ridiculous. Telepolis is tin-foil, crackpot conspiracy-mongering. It being anywhere close in quality to reputable news sources is laughable. It's so far off the mark, I wouldn't even know where to put it on the traditional left/right scale. The "incoherent"<->"this is satire, right?" scale is its natural habitat.
I like reading Telepolis for just that: willingness to question mainstream consensus. Sometimes they do swerve wildly into crackpot territory. Some authors on there I just don't read because they've written shit in the past.
Read the DPA newsticker if you really just want "Merkel said X", "Train accident in Y", etc.
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.
Spiegel, ZEIT and Süddeutsche, especially their online editions aren't good recommendations for someone asking for news free of political agenda. During the last decade they have become very left-leaning, which is a sad development. I occasionally pick up a print copy of Zeit and Spiegel and these seem to be fine, but e.g. Der Spiegel also put Trump decapitating the Statue of Liberty on their cover (just inappropriate). I've never understood the good reputation of Süddeutsche, they are just doing very shallow reporting.
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.
Exactly my thoughts. Also, I definitely do not like the self-righteous and pompous shaming they are now doing. If you read the original German article(s!) on spiegel.de, Claas Relotius is painted as this criminal mastermind, "one of the journalistic idols of his generation" (as a German, I have never heard of him), because only a nefarious genius could've been able to do something like this the "Spiegel" and circumvent all these "great" safeguard mechanisms. They cite internal emails by him, which is just bad taste. They are even trying to introduce the term "a Relotius" as a synonym for journalistic fraud into the German language, as in: "this was a classic Relotius". It's pathetic.
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 don't necessarily disagree that Der Spiegel could be more humble in its tone (I can't tell, not being able to read its indepth explanation in the original German). But I don't believe that Relotius deserves any sympathy or leeway if these allegations are true. Fabrication is a far bigger transgression than "massively overdone" it. What does visiting a high security prison in Kurdistan have to do with anything?
You are right, he does not deserve sympathy, but he deserves fair treatment. I really did not like the "he did everything wrong, we are gods" tone of the Spiegel articles on the issue today, so my post above was a bit opinionated.
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.
I can only speak for myself, but as a relatively low-tier journalist, I can confidently say I've never fabricated anything in my reporting. I may have made errors (misspelling names/titles/etc), or ill-informed judgments (thinking someone was a better expert/source than they were). But making something up requires crossing a clear line beyond incompetence. And I would never trust the journalistic output of anyone who was found to have made up anything. Because the process of journalism is ultimately about complete trust -- no matter how many editors/fact-checkers you have, it all comes down to what the reporters themselves say they have witnessed/heard. It's already common enough to misobserve something, it's just as easy to lie about something that only you were "there" to see/her -- thus, the need to make fabrication (and plagiarism, which can be seen as a subset of fabrication) so taboo. And any reporter who justifies breaking this taboo has most certainly justified breaking rules in grayer situations -- e.g. I've never known of a fabricator to have fabricated just once. Once they get away with it the first time, what's the reason to ever stop?
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 don't really understand your logic. I get that there's (sometimes) a social contract that journalists should produce factual work. However, I don't think that facts organize themselves into stories, without a degree of fabrication. Whether that fabrication is just a matter of ordering, emphasis, spin - or even elements made from new cloth seems a bit arbitrary to me.
As I see it, factual questions are inherently amoral. My moral position would be that nobody should read the news. I suspect this would vastly improve public understanding of current events.
Maybe you’re understanding “fabrication” for its meaning in manufacturing — e.g. fabricating a computer chip. In the journalism context, “fabrication” is used to mean, “making up facts/falsehoods”.
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.
I'm broadly skeptical of the possibility, even given a great deal of talent and integrity, of accurately and objectively reporting the events of a given day with the paucity of lead time that journalists work with. Historians take years to develop a balanced understanding of a given event. Journalists must do so in twenty minutes, after a morning coffee.
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.
>a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - common practice
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.
After reading the recent post on Medium by two Americans who tried to expose Relotius last year [1] I have to say that my formulation "may have massively overdone it" above may have been a massive understatement.
I couldn't agree more. During daytime in Germany they had the top three slots on their front page covered with stories about Relotius. "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste" taken by heart.
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.
> 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.
My interpretation is that the Spiegel chiefs want to make an example out of Relotius, to send a message to other journalists, that they must stick to the facts, or they will suffer the same fate. I don't think Class Relotius will be writing for any serious magazines or newspapers in the coming years. He may leave journalism and find another use for his talent as a writer. How can a newspaper or magazine ensure the veracity of its writers? Losing your career if you are found to lie seems like a good strategy.
> 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?
A single fabricated story that slips thorough can be a people are flawed problem. 60 stories from a fraudster, discovered by a colleague who investigated on his own money, got no support from superiors and had to fear for his job. That, is an organizational problem.
> 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.
It seems they could have handled the doubts of Juan Moreno better. That is an institutional problem that can be improved upon.
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.
It certainly reads that way. But please, let them indulge in their fifteen minutes of self-righteousness: if that's what it takes to avoid a coverup, it is a very small price to pay.
Because Der Spiegel publishes primarily in German, it was hard to even find the articles that Relotius wrote, even though DS says the articles will remain as-is until the conclusion of their investigation.
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:
> 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.
Wow, reading their debunking, what that journalist did is fucking disgusting. The Spiegel article mentions the whole office is in shock, I can imagine, it's probably like realizing your wonderful spouse has been having an affair for the last 10 years.
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...
I'm definitely someone of low ambition and likely low imagination, but I've never understood the desire as a journalist to fabricate when, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. For the sake of argument, let's assume that places like Fergus Falls, MN, are actually representative of the communities responsible for Trump's victory, and that Trump's victory, to the Der Spiegel readership, is a "bad thing".
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...
Seems crazy that such an important and far reaching news story ends up... basically just nowhere.
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