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.
What made all this worse was the fact that Der Spiegel was looked up to for (supposedly) having a solid team of fact-checkers.
As the medium post shows (and the magazine's own investigation afterwards) was that not even basic and publicly available info was checked, such as the percentage of pro-Trump voters, let alone the rest of the original article's hilariously ridiculous claims.
Another Der Spiegel reporter who was suspicious of Relotius tried raising his concerns with the management after he did some digging of his own, which almost cost him his job and reputation:
Der Spiegel enjoyed the profits of Relotius' fiction and peddled literal fake news to the world for years, and the magazine's readers lapped it all up because it reinforced their biases.
I second this.
It’s mind boggling how bad DER SPEGEL does basic research.
I did not find it surprising at all, that the Relotius-scandal^1 happened at DER SPIEGEL.
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?
Slightly related: the co-author of this piece, Juan Moreno, has discovered that his colleauge, an award-winning Spiegel author, instead of doing honest journalistic work, completely invented his stories (including the ones he got the awards for). He discovered the fraud, collected evidence, and called it out despite resistance from inside the newspaper organization (who wants to admit that they have been printing fradulent stories for years and not noticing it). Amazing guy! More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius
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.
Claas Relotius, the Der Spiegel journalist who won CNN's journalist of the year award who was revelead to be completely inventing stories about people to make enticing click bait.
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.
A site would have to get quite big to have many casual readers from Fergus Falls (population ~13000) preapproving its German articles though, even taking into account some people remember meeting him and eventually got round to blogging about it.
Actually, it's interesting how little attention internet haters paid to Relotius, considering he was writing on polarising subjects, winning awards and he was arrogant enough to throw in details that were trivially proven wrong like election results as well as random deniable lies about the individuals he interviewed or said he interviewed. Perhaps writing in German and on things happening overseas helped shield him. But yeah, agree that internet haters are the way forward for crowdsourced factchecking (at least on subjects a bit less partisan than politics or sport where the haters can generally be relied on to reach some sort of consensus)
At object level, this article has no reason to exist. An editor of a German newspaper fucked an intern. International breaking news.
But of course, for watchers of the NYT and how America likes to conduct its uh international relations it’s a very familiar sight. Sneaky one might say.
Bild’s politics are now center-right [lol], but have grown sharp-edged under Mr. Reichelt, a former war correspondent. The tabloid initially welcomed Syrian refugees, then turned bitterly critical of immigration (though it is also hostile to the far-right AfD party). A Washington correspondent for Bild complained, in internal Slack messages that subsequently leaked, of a slant toward Donald Trump in the coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential debates. The paper has also attacked the German government’s Covid restrictions and its main public health expert.
There you go. Payback. Being an atlanticist lapdog 90% of the time just isn’t good enough.
Spiegel is not really credible, they’ve published a large number of completely fabricated stories. If they can’t see through the deception of one of their reporters there is no way they can make sense of misinformation by more competent adversaries.
I’m fairly convinced it’s not remotely limited to Der Spiegel. If primary sources aren’t cited in downloadable attachments, it’s just best to assume the thing is a pure work of fiction.
I have absolutely zero respect for “journalism” at this time. It is, as far as I’m concerned, an entirely dead art, all life sucked from it by the great destroyer we call the Internet.
This network we created, and in particular most of the shiny things at L7, is not healthy for even an above average psyche. It attenuates all feedback loops that our bodies require to form empathy, while amplifying the worst parts of us through appeals to fame, fortune, and notoriety.
I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the construct that he didn’t even have a chance, the better.
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.
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