4 ms·

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 Spiege

by lqet 8y ago

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.

danso 8y ago
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.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  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.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Maybe you need to reconsider your personal sense of ethics. This strikes me as a staunchly immoral, or at least amoral, view.
    - pasabagi 8y ago
      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.
  - danso 8y ago
    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.
    - pasabagi 8y ago
      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.
oldgradstudent 8y ago
The Spiegel has a lot to explain, and blaming it on Relotius alone is pathetic. However, > 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-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7 https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

by lqet 8y ago

danso 8y ago

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.

pasabagi 8y ago
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.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Maybe you need to reconsider your personal sense of ethics. This strikes me as a staunchly immoral, or at least amoral, view.
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    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.
- danso 8y ago
  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.
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    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.

oldgradstudent 8y ago

The Spiegel has a lot to explain, and blaming it on Relotius alone is pathetic. However, > 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-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7 https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...