4 ms·

People 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

by danso 8y ago

People 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 ago
Don’t need to call the city. The most common touristy photo is the city sign.
- danso 8y ago
  You'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 ago
    I 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.
forapurpose 8y ago
Could some of the situation be due to differences between German and American conceptions and assumptions about journalism? I mean on a nuanced level; obviously German journalists don't think they should publish falsehoods. Purely as examples of differences that could have an impact: Maybe fact-checking is more the responsibility of the journalist; maybe 'news' is perceived more the way American journalism perceives opinion pieces, with their accompanying lower standards of accuracy (something I still don't understand - outright deception is commonly accepted in opinion pieces, in the most serious publications). It would be a mistake to assume all journalism is conceived of and operates in the same way, in all countries. Also, Der Spiegel has long had an extraordinary reputation; my impression is that, of publications outside English-speaking countries, Der Spiegel has the best reputation among Americans. I'm not sure that many do their own evaluation, though Der Speigel looks like what we expect serious journalism to look like. Taking a longer view than just this immediate problem, do they deserve the reputation? If not, I'd be interested in who others recommend (outside English-speaking countries).
- ar0 8y ago
  To be honest, I was quite surprised because I heard that Der Spiegel has an „extraordinary reputation“ in the U.S. for the first time today on HN. I am German and even when I went to school (before the „life-sucking Internet“ from a comment below) there was the saying that all you could trust in Der Spiegel are the dates and numbers (although this article suggests even that might be too much). IMHO, there are much better German-language news sources out there (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Brand Eins, to name just a few with differing political leanings).
  - Tomte 8y ago
    The reputation is about fact-checking, i.e. dates and numbers.
    - ascar 8y ago
      Fact-checking isn't just about dates and numbers, but about all facts presented in an article. As a German I'm also surprised about that reputation. The Spiegel is somewhere between a serious newspaper (like FAZ, Süddeutsche or Zeit) and a tabloid (like Bild). Hunting for great headlines and stories, but not necessarily concerned with objective news reporting.
jaabe 8y ago
Most workplaces operate on a high amount of trust though, especially in Western Europe. If you’ve achieved star-reporter status at der Spiegel, as such that you’re sent 3 weeks to America to do investigative journalism, it goes to reason, that you also meet a high amount of trust. So I think it’s easy to see how the editorial staff might have missed the problem. I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, we do a lot of internal reviewing of employee behaviour. When things go wrong, it’s possible to steal 111 million danish kroner after all[0]. Despite our best efforts, things still do go wrong though, and that’s because, even in the heart of bureaucracy, we still rely on trust, and when people intentionally abuse it, shit happens. It’s unfortunate, but things aren’t perfect. Everyone is pressed for financial resources and then everything from financial security to editorial journalism becomes patch-work “good enough” type systems. Because the perfect system simply doesn’t exist. One of my user accounts has a lot of privileges for instance, more than it rightly should. It’s like that because I need access to so many different things, that our IT-department would need a half-time hire if they were to keep my user rights for our 500 different IT systems up to speed. It’s an imperfect solution that only works as long as I don’t misbehave, and while we do a lot of internal reviewing, the truth is I could abuse those rights. At least Der Spiegel fired the fraudster when they found out. [0] https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-kroner-senere https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-krone...
- belorn 8y ago
  If we are relying on a system of trust then it is important that overseeing bodies are unbiased and unconnected to those those they oversee. More often than not, a failure in a trust model happens because of a unseen relationship that biased the overseeing body to either miss the problem, ignore the problem, or explicitly being blocked from doing anything about it. I would like to ask what caused der spiegel system to fail, and I would guess that given the context of this article with the 2016 election and trump, a portrait of rural America that is this extreme would have raised alarm bells if their internal fact checking group had a more diverse mix of political views. The story is way to clean and fit too nicely the political narrative that now in the after match it seems almost silly.
- dan00 8y ago
jayalpha 8y ago
"Der Spiegel's purportedly high-performing fact-checking operation." I am not trolling. But seriously, I doubt that the Spiegel has any "fact checking" that deserves the name. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that the Spiegel has some serious "opinion policing". It was once a news magazine run by journalists. Now it is more or less a political voice for the guy who inherited the majority of the shares. I would not call it a news magazine anymore, nor would I call it serious journalism. The guy delivered just what he was supposed to deliver. His messages fitted so undeliverable well in what they wanted to hear and communicate. See this article form 1973: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41955159.html http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41955159.html Today Spiegel would call this "hate speech". The declining sales numbers are not surprising. In history, propaganda was free. You pay for journalism but who is going to pay for propaganda?
- tptacek 8y ago
  I don't have any reason to doubt you about the direction Spiegel has taken and based on other stories in the past few years I'm not a fan. But this story you've cited --- maybe it loses something in the Google translation? --- is pretty gross.
  - weinzierl 8y ago
    > --- maybe it loses something in the Google translation? --- is pretty gross. The translation is not to blame - the story is pretty gross. At least that is my opinion as a German native speaker.
  - coolso 8y ago
    > gross Can I ask what exactly is gross about it? I didn't read the article in full, but did skim through it for a few minutes, and it seems to me its only "crime" is not being politically correct by the modern standards of today. But I question whether or not that's truly a bad thing. Are journalists only allowed to write positively about immigrants and refugees or any other group that is considered "underprivileged", while hiding anything remotely negative? It could be argued that that in itself is gross. Is that the standard of freedom of speech and freedom of the press that we should be striving for?

by danso 8y ago

ryacko 8y ago

Don’t need to call the city. The most common touristy photo is the city sign.

danso 8y ago
You'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 ago
  I 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.

forapurpose 8y ago

Could some of the situation be due to differences between German and American conceptions and assumptions about journalism? I mean on a nuanced level; obviously German journalists don't think they should publish falsehoods. Purely as examples of differences that could have an impact: Maybe fact-checking is more the responsibility of the journalist; maybe 'news' is perceived more the way American journalism perceives opinion pieces, with their accompanying lower standards of accuracy (something I still don't understand - outright deception is commonly accepted in opinion pieces, in the most serious publications). It would be a mistake to assume all journalism is conceived of and operates in the same way, in all countries. Also, Der Spiegel has long had an extraordinary reputation; my impression is that, of publications outside English-speaking countries, Der Spiegel has the best reputation among Americans. I'm not sure that many do their own evaluation, though Der Speigel looks like what we expect serious journalism to look like. Taking a longer view than just this immediate problem, do they deserve the reputation? If not, I'd be interested in who others recommend (outside English-speaking countries).

ar0 8y ago
To be honest, I was quite surprised because I heard that Der Spiegel has an „extraordinary reputation“ in the U.S. for the first time today on HN. I am German and even when I went to school (before the „life-sucking Internet“ from a comment below) there was the saying that all you could trust in Der Spiegel are the dates and numbers (although this article suggests even that might be too much). IMHO, there are much better German-language news sources out there (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Brand Eins, to name just a few with differing political leanings).
- Tomte 8y ago
  The reputation is about fact-checking, i.e. dates and numbers.
  - ascar 8y ago
    Fact-checking isn't just about dates and numbers, but about all facts presented in an article. As a German I'm also surprised about that reputation. The Spiegel is somewhere between a serious newspaper (like FAZ, Süddeutsche or Zeit) and a tabloid (like Bild). Hunting for great headlines and stories, but not necessarily concerned with objective news reporting.

jaabe 8y ago

Most workplaces operate on a high amount of trust though, especially in Western Europe. If you’ve achieved star-reporter status at der Spiegel, as such that you’re sent 3 weeks to America to do investigative journalism, it goes to reason, that you also meet a high amount of trust. So I think it’s easy to see how the editorial staff might have missed the problem. I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, we do a lot of internal reviewing of employee behaviour. When things go wrong, it’s possible to steal 111 million danish kroner after all[0]. Despite our best efforts, things still do go wrong though, and that’s because, even in the heart of bureaucracy, we still rely on trust, and when people intentionally abuse it, shit happens. It’s unfortunate, but things aren’t perfect. Everyone is pressed for financial resources and then everything from financial security to editorial journalism becomes patch-work “good enough” type systems. Because the perfect system simply doesn’t exist. One of my user accounts has a lot of privileges for instance, more than it rightly should. It’s like that because I need access to so many different things, that our IT-department would need a half-time hire if they were to keep my user rights for our 500 different IT systems up to speed. It’s an imperfect solution that only works as long as I don’t misbehave, and while we do a lot of internal reviewing, the truth is I could abuse those rights. At least Der Spiegel fired the fraudster when they found out. [0] https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-kroner-senere https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-krone...

belorn 8y ago
If we are relying on a system of trust then it is important that overseeing bodies are unbiased and unconnected to those those they oversee. More often than not, a failure in a trust model happens because of a unseen relationship that biased the overseeing body to either miss the problem, ignore the problem, or explicitly being blocked from doing anything about it. I would like to ask what caused der spiegel system to fail, and I would guess that given the context of this article with the 2016 election and trump, a portrait of rural America that is this extreme would have raised alarm bells if their internal fact checking group had a more diverse mix of political views. The story is way to clean and fit too nicely the political narrative that now in the after match it seems almost silly.
dan00 8y ago

jayalpha 8y ago

"Der Spiegel's purportedly high-performing fact-checking operation." I am not trolling. But seriously, I doubt that the Spiegel has any "fact checking" that deserves the name. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that the Spiegel has some serious "opinion policing". It was once a news magazine run by journalists. Now it is more or less a political voice for the guy who inherited the majority of the shares. I would not call it a news magazine anymore, nor would I call it serious journalism. The guy delivered just what he was supposed to deliver. His messages fitted so undeliverable well in what they wanted to hear and communicate. See this article form 1973: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41955159.html http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41955159.html Today Spiegel would call this "hate speech". The declining sales numbers are not surprising. In history, propaganda was free. You pay for journalism but who is going to pay for propaganda?

tptacek 8y ago
I don't have any reason to doubt you about the direction Spiegel has taken and based on other stories in the past few years I'm not a fan. But this story you've cited --- maybe it loses something in the Google translation? --- is pretty gross.
- weinzierl 8y ago
  > --- maybe it loses something in the Google translation? --- is pretty gross. The translation is not to blame - the story is pretty gross. At least that is my opinion as a German native speaker.
- coolso 8y ago
  > gross Can I ask what exactly is gross about it? I didn't read the article in full, but did skim through it for a few minutes, and it seems to me its only "crime" is not being politically correct by the modern standards of today. But I question whether or not that's truly a bad thing. Are journalists only allowed to write positively about immigrants and refugees or any other group that is considered "underprivileged", while hiding anything remotely negative? It could be argued that that in itself is gross. Is that the standard of freedom of speech and freedom of the press that we should be striving for?