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The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town
- shshhdhs 8y agoWow, Der Spiegal’s lack of fact checking is sad, and it seems like pure fraudulent writing. I love the breakdown of counter-investigative journalism here.
- yostrovs 8y agoThe have nearly 100 people in their fact check department. Legendary German efficiency.
- oldgradstudent 8y agohttps://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_largest_fact.php https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_l...
- dmoy 8y agoHa, Fergus Falls. Driven through there many a time. Don't know if I've ever stopped... too close to Fargo/Moorhead on the drive up/back. This whole article reads like that guy from the fifth season of The Wire.
- protomyth 8y agoI've taken to stopping at the Fergus Falls Walmart on my way through. I guess I got a bit old and need that stop after Fargo for gas and food. Its basically half-way between Fargo and Alexandria which means its going to have lower traffic because both of them are bigger. Plus, along that route Fargo & St. Cloud have cheaper gas prices. It is a good stop point if you are having car trouble or the weather gets a bit too much to handle. 1) Fargo, ND often has the cheapest gas in the area because it has 3 pipelines going through the town.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI wonder if this guy is just a compulsive liar who happened to fake his way into a journalism career; I wonder if we'll hear stories from his acquaintances about this.
- starbeast 8y ago>I wonder if this guy is just a compulsive liar who happened to fake his way into a journalism career That accurately describes one of the established ways to bookend a stint in politics. In the UK, this caliber of bullshit would either tip them for a future cabinet post should they ever stand for election, or indicate that they are a recently retired MP, fabricating scandal to preserve some remaining public relevance, which they know only how to measure in inches of print.
- danso 8y agoPeople were right in the previous discussion [0] to criticize Der Spiegel's self-serving sanctimonious tone in their writeup of the scandal. It's impossible to read the allegations by the Fergus Falls residents here and square them with Der Spiegel's purportedly high-performing fact-checking operation. It's not just only that they failed to detect their reporter's malicious deception. But they failed to do the most basic kind of fact-checking. For instance, I could see them failing to get to the bottom of an ephemeral fact like whether someone had put up a sign saying "Mexicans Keep Out". But calling the city to confirm that the official city sign says "Home of Damn Good Folks", and the theater to confirm that they were playing "American Sniper" in 2017? Those are the kind of facts that at a bare minimum professional fact-checkers should be double-checking. Even something like the claim that the city administrator was a gun-toting virgin is something that a fact-checker is expected to call and independently confirm. And even if the guy gives a non-committal denial, e.g. "That's ridiculous, I don't want have anything to do with your left-wing fake news article!", the fact-checker should be prying the reporter for all the documentation/notes that support the claim. In fact, in this scenario, the fact-checker should be highly suspicious that the city official is so standoffish, if the reporter managed to gain his trust enough in the first place to reveal that he's a virgin (and is ostensibly embarrassed about it). Der Spiegel has a lot of questions it has to answer for how it failed so thoroughly for so many years here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716613
- ryacko 8y agoDon’t need to call the city. The most common touristy photo is the city sign.
- danso 8y agoYou're going to have to call someone to confirm, including whichever random tourist took the photo you found on Google Images, why not get it straight from the horse's mouth?
- EpicEng 8y agoI think the point is that even a minimal amount of digging into the facts behind this story would have raised a few red flags. It obviously wasn't vetted at all.
- monksy 8y agoBesides the obivious lack of oversight on Der Spiegel and ethics of the journalist. I believe that there are a few lessons we can take away here: 1. We value honest hard work. However, we rarely value the people who do it. (The journalist was a "star" journalist and was required to perform at that level constantly.. does this ring a bell to any developers?) 2. Confirmation Bias is rather nasty, and that has been used to propagate some bad narritives. Right now the political deviviness has encouraged by the media. This article: Look at these "racist", "sexist", *ist people in some low-class people in this rural area. At least this is what I get from it. (That's been the garbage tauted by the left) 3. This guy was trusted as a leader way too much. I would not be surprised if he's a psychopath. (He has no concerns over the people he screws over, and the only reason he seems sorry is that he got caught).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- PavlovsCat 8y agoAs this guy [0] (a TV moderator who handed Relotius several of his awards) says, that journalist was under no economic pressure, at all. And the interviewed person also calls out this worldview in which everybody is a victim, nobody is an actor, and many journalists are more concerned about them being victims than being victimizers. And it really is telling that the perpetrator so easily gets styled as kind-of-also-a-victim, as if having won a few prizes created this pressure/temptation no human could possibly withstand. (I started to write my comment in response to someone who replied to you and said you using the word sociopath was "dehumanizing", and that they don't want to defend the journalist, but that "any normal and well adjusted person" could have gotten addicted to having won prizes -- that as well as some comments on the first story about the subject on HN is what I meant with styling them as victim, not your comment as such) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TrfRWnYCo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TrfRWnYCo0
- MrBuddyCasino 8y ago> I would not be surprised if he's a psychopath. When I first heard of him, his behavior and how people described him that was my first thought. It ticks all the boxes: - „nicest guy I know“, knows intuitively what people want to hear - is extremely good at fooling others, and can uphold a fake story for a long time - does it for narcissistic reasons, and to enrich himself with no deeper goal in life - adept at building alliances with people in power (the guy who got him was afraid he would be fired)
- lqet 8y agoThe latest accusation against him is embezzlement [0]. Also, the Spiegel reporter who tried to unmask Relotius was threatened with a termination of his contract when he talked to supervisors about his findings. [1]. Also in the FAZ, there was a very good commentary on the whole case by one of the publishers [2]. He identifies the same narrative smoke-bombs ("story-telling kitsch") in the Spiegel's writeup of the whole case as in Relotius' original articles. [0] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/betrug-beim-spiegel-claas-relotius-veruntreute-offenbar-auch-spendengelder-15955791.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/betrug-beim-sp... [1] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/fall-relotius-spiegel-reporter-mit-rauswurf-gedroht-15954983.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/fall-relotius-... [2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueber-die-faelschungen-von-claas-relotius-im-spiegel-15954144.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueber-die-fa...
- the8472 8y agoYou often see complaints about this story-telling kitch here on HNs in response to many long-form articles garnished with many paragraphs of tangential location and people stories.
- quonn 8y agoI came across [2] as well, yesterday, and particularly liked the conclusion: Slightly improved Google translation: „One does not write about arguments, ideas and concerns, but about the people who supposedly have them and about how they are, how they look and how they live, where one has met them, how dangerous, or at least exotic it was to meet them at all, and that the wind lashed against the quay wall, when splendor and misery came together at night in the room no. such-and-such. But as long as one writes in such a way, because one thinks in such a way, the case of Relotius will only lead to appeals to conscience and to the condemnation of those without conscience. The underlying issue, the storytelling kitsch, will not change.“
- hopler 8y agoIn USA this is called gonzo journalism, and artistic form that decimated journalism by replacing it with literature that is more fun to read and write but less useful.
- oldgradstudent 8y agoA few years ago the Columbia Journalism Review published an article about how great Der Spiegel's fact checkers were. https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_largest_fact.php https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_l... It's quite obvious that article about that small town had not passed through the most cursory fact checking. The CJR owes some explanation.
- smadge 8y agoMy impression from that interview is that the fact checkers are not doing things like calling movies theaters, mayors, or owners of restaurants and verifying the statements they allegedly made in their interviews with the reporter are true. Instead they are cross referencing claims made by their reporters, things like whether or not a politician has been quoted in a reputable newspaper as saying something, or how many jobs were created in a time period, with their database of open source intelligence. Is it expected that a fact checker contact everyone a journalist interviewed and go over each sentence and claim line by line and verify that it is true?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oldgradstudent 8y agoThat's a great point. I was under the impression those were just examples. The article says that the biggest difference from the american model is the timing of consulting with the fact checkers. As far as I understand, in the american model the fact checker is often responsible to verify sources and details, as described in The New Yorker job description: https://www.newyorker.com/home/about/fact-checker https://www.newyorker.com/home/about/fact-checker
- whatshisface 8y agoI would argue that fact checkers should send a copy of the publication to everyone who was interviewed, and should be the first line of contact for "I didn't say that."
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- itronitron 8y agoSome of you might be interested in a good example of an article about a small town done right... >> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-washingtons-atomic-legacy.html http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-wash...
- Wildgoose 8y agoThanks - that is a very good and BALANCED article.
- pram 8y agoMaybe they were too willing to believe his depiction of small town America as a bunch of poorly educated, bigoted hicks? Perhaps because it confirmed their own biases? I know it’s a German publication, but this is perhaps a symptom of the monoculture that permeates a lot of organizations in the “West”
- beginningguava 8y agoyou can't be bigoted against white conservatives /s believe me, the liberals and progressives I work with in the tech industry are just as bigoted if not worse than anyone I met growing up in the midwest. They outright dehumanize the "other" ie conservatives with complete blindness to the hypocrisy.
- hopler 8y agoReally? They beat up conservatives and vote for laws to prevent them from getting married or health care?
- assblaster 8y agoI'm not sure if you're joking or not, but mobs of liberal activists assaulted Trump supporters in San Jose after a rally. Trump is openly supportive of LGBTQIA+++ people, was the first Republican presidential nominee to be, and was supportive of them long before Hillary and Obama were. Healthcare does not automatically equate to socialized healthcare, and it is ignorant and arrogant to make a blanket characterization that voting for a Republican is a vote against "healthcare", whatever that's supposed to mean.
- Eleopteryx 8y ago>but mobs of liberal activists assaulted Trump supporters in San Jose after a rally. Trump supporters were assaulted, that much is factual. The notion that they were a) liberal b) activists, is not a notion you can support with facts.
- CPLX 8y agoThe irony is that nearly every prestigious American publication has run dozens of versions of this story, and while most of those should be presumed to be factually accurate, they are fundamentally the same work of fiction.
- beginningguava 8y agoIt's not difficult to push your agenda with it technically being "true". Just interview 100 people, focus on 1 or two, maybe take their quotes out of context, and congratulations you can portray an entire town or demographic in a negative light that fits with your readers preconceived notions
- sonnyblarney 8y agoIn 2018 you don't need to interview anyone. You just cruise Twitter to find some random poor soul who said something consistent with the narrative you want to construct. Now you say: "People are saying XYZ" And deflect the source of the narrative from yourself.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoI agree, the bizarre fascination with a very small demographic (Coal miners/truck drivers/diner patrons are still with Trump!) strikes me as simultaneously condescending to rural Americans while also missing the real story, especially considering 40 congressional seats flipped this year in "Whole Foods" territory.
- hopler 8y agoPeople who work at the major employing sectors and eat food are not a small demographic. What is "Whole Foods" territory? The "Blue wave" flipping 40 congressional seats was the major story of the 2018 election.
- assblaster 8y agoThe big story is actually that the DNC was able to flip only a small amount of house seats, instead of the landslide they were expected to get, and also that the DNC lost Senate seats.
- friedman23 8y agoI remember an interesting discussion I read either here or on reddit between an American and a German where the German stated that he believed he had an accurate idea of what life was like in the US. I didn't have an opinion on who was right or wrong in that discussion at the time but if the lies stated in this article about this town did not immediately send off the bullshit detector for most Germans I'm afraid they've been fed a significant amount of misinformation and propaganda and really have no idea how we live here.
- ciguy 8y agoI have lived in Europe for about 5 years now, and sadly this is correct. German and French media in particular seem to delight in disparaging America and Americans. Most Germans I've talked to are incredibly misinformed about what life in America is actually like. They think the entire country is more like a small southern town and that police roam the streets shooting citizens at random. We have our problems of course and are far from perfect but the extent of them is grossly exaggerated by European media.
- friedman23 8y agoEven the southern towns aren't like their caricatures. Don't feel bad, people in California do the same thing and they don't even have the excuse of language or distance.
- garmaine 8y agoWhich is actually part of the problem. Hollywood is in is in own massive filter bubble, and what Hollywood portrays about America is what the world believes... whereas most Americans look at Hollywood/Los Angeles with the same confused bemusement.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago> and that police roam the streets shooting citizens at random. In a sense this this is not so divorced from reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#... So if you ignore the context, it does seem like police roam the street shooting citizens at random.
- zaroth 8y agoI’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.
- zarkov99 8y agoThis is exactly right. And this decay is in no small part responsible for the lunatic, polarized times we live in. It is impossible to come together if we do even have shared facts to reason with.
- Nasrudith 8y agoThat was around way before the internet, before radio even. The printing press has been used to spread outright works of fiction as reality. To be frank it is more a human nature thing.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoI'm inclined to agree and the sad part is, journalism is an essential NGO organ of civil society. The 4th Estate is a very important thing for us all. Watching Cable News these days is crazy because you can watch journalists, spin, lie and misrepresent ... but at the very same time they are presenting facts that do matter. Go take a look at 'waybackmacine' and click some links from even 10 years go - the news was not nearly as crazy and clickbaity. I truly hope that things can settle down a bit maybe in the next political cycle. Finally - I should say that almost all MSM left and right completely misrepresent middle America. The reality in Cleveland, rural Ohio, Utah, Houston, Alabama ... it's just not anywhere to be found on the news unless something terrible that happens where the press wants to use that piece of information to construct a narrative. Edit: I should add that there is a very real financial pressure right now for journos - newspapapers are falling apart everywhere, this is a real thing. Individual journos are not natural capitalists. We used to pay for the news we don't now, and we still haven't figured out a model. This is a major factor.
- forapurpose 8y agoThe original article, with the same title, researched and written by two residents of the town, is here: https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7 https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m... I think that's a better link than the one above, which is to a partisan political website.
- tom4000 8y agoPlus it is not behind a pay wall.
- DanielBMarkham 8y agoAs somebody who does a lot of writing and used to write news copy, this is a story I've been following for a while. In my mind it's easily the biggest story in journalism this year. The internet has made everybody a publisher, from your cousin who thinks Elvis isn't dead to that MIT scientist with 17 degrees. And they're all online. It's also created an instant feedback loop, where you instantly measure how "good" your publishing is by tracking clicks, page time metrics, and referrals. It even provides a zero-overhead revenue model. The money's not what publishing used to be, but hey, you can tap into it without having to do much. Finally, because of the previous items, it has destroyed traditional journalism. What do I see when I consume journalism today? I see fear. Everybody knows it's dead and internet eyeballs is the only thing that does anything. The person and their emotional connection over Twitter, FB, YouTube and the like is the brand, not the paper or magazine. Everybody knows that. This means the old guard is gone, the people who used to sit in an office and tell you that your story was crap. They cost too much in overhead and nobody cares if your story was crap as long as you correct it the next day. (It's all self-correcting, right?) So instead of news, we now have celebrities who give their personal impressions of how it all makes them feel. People reward or punish publishers by their ability to draw them into some event and make them feel one way or the other. This reporter (I use the term loosely) knew how to do a great job of that. He also knew that the emotional content far outweighed the rest of it. People loved him. His publisher loved him. Until they didn't. The only reason he was fired, the only reason BigNetCorp X would care if they're screwing you over or not, is because enough other people were able to raise a big enough rukus that it couldn't be ignored. He could have kept doing this for years as long as he was willing to scale his fabrications in accordance to how much of a PR stink people could have made. While interesting as a stand-alone story, my feeling is that each of these just makes the next bunch more clever. It's not a very good time to be alive for people who like journalism.
- justkd 8y agoDavid Kriesel (the guy who detected the Xerox issue 3 years ago) has been data mining Spiegel Online (the online version of Der Spiegel) for a couple of years now. It will be interesting to see what other articles are full of fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpwsdRKt8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpwsdRKt8Q Maybe David is willing to hand out the data he has downloaded?
- ascar 8y agoKinda offtopic: I find it interesting and a little bit disturbing to read "Der Spiegel". "Der" is the German male form of "the" and the Spiegel uses it in the title like "The New York Times". For me as a German the comments here read like: A "The New York Times" article stated... which is odd, everyone usually drops the "the", if it doesn't fit.
- yhoneycomb 8y agoHmm interesting. So it would make more sense to you to read "The Spiegel's article..."?
- ascar 8y agoYes. We also change the "der" in German newspapers. E.g. "at the Spiegel" "bei dem Spiegel" or "in an article of the Spiegel" "in einem Bericht des Spiegels".
- philshem 8y agoHere’s a great twitter thread from a German-based American fact checker. https://twitter.com/spoke32/status/1076219412485677056 https://twitter.com/spoke32/status/1076219412485677056 >> As far as I can tell from their mea culpa, this vetting process is limited to what can be Googled from Hamburg.
- sweden 8y agoOh dear, one of those Tweets that should have been some sort of proper blog post. The damn thing doesn't even load properly with cookies disabled. I apologize for the toxicity but the content got lost to me.
- misil 8y agoMy favorite tidbit of this story: In 2014, Relotius sold two stories to the monthly magazine of a Swiss paper, both interviews with hairdressers. The second one (still online: https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar-dunkel https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar...), a supposed interview with a Finnish hairdresser immediately received a comment from someone in Finland ("this report seems to be fiction"), complaining that the mentioned salon doesn't actually exist, the mentioned prices were all wrong and the mentioned name had the wrong gender. The magazine printed a correction and decided to no longer work with the author. No offense to Finnish hairdressers, but if someone completely fabricates a story this meaningless, it's reasonable to assume that he's a pathological liar and not a single written word of his can be taken seriously. Given that the guy was such a pathological liar, even about trivial matters, I find it very hard to believe that no one supposedly ever had any suspicion about the truthfulness of writing.
- Tycho 8y agoTo be honest, my impression of modern journalism at established news organizations is: * business model crashing, so experienced staff laid off * smart millennials don't opt for a career in journalism * the ones who do emerge inculcated by the college monoculture, largely unable to question authority * growing up with net-access, they are ill-equipped for any method of fact-finding except google searches * laziness, incompetence and docile conformity make them soft targets for vested interests * many stories are therefore just regurgitated press releases * many 'reactions' are strikingly uniform across independent organizations On the bright side, the internet allows real information to route around the established press, greatly reducing their ability to shape public opinion or suppress stories that don't fit someone's agenda. We could be entering a golden age of independent journalists whose careers live and die by their reputation for integrity. But even if we are not, wikileaks style journalism -- the transmission of source documents -- should see us through.
- luord 8y agoIf it weren't because the article came out in 2017, I'd have thought that this Relotius fellow played too much "Far Cry V" and thought it was a documentary. Also, TIL that many germans haven't watched "Game of Thrones", apparently.