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

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?