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Maybe 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

• beginningguava 8y ago
  you 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 ago
    Really? They beat up conservatives and vote for laws to prevent them from getting married or health care?
    • assblaster 8y ago
      I'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.
        • beginningguava 8y ago
          https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3-year-probation-deal-in-berkeley-rally-bike-lock-assault-case https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3... progressive university professor and black lives matter activist cracked a trump supporters skull with a bike lock Of course since our court system is a joke filled with activist judges he gets 3 year probation for what should be attempted murder If you flip the situation it's a hate crime covered daily by the mainstream media
          • Eleopteryx 8y ago
            You're running off on tangential points about absolutely nothing. Your original point was that your professional colleagues were bigoted against white conservatives. Now you're talking about politically-motivated violence in general and your critique of the courts and the mainstream media. Did you get everything off of your chest yet? Did you or your alternate account have any other grievances that you wanted list?
• starik36 8y ago
  You are probably right on the money. And that likely happens with the rest of the mainstream media - the readers/viewers will believe whatever is fed to them because it aligns with their narrative of the world.
• atoav 8y ago
  I live in Germany and the story of the liar journalist fascinates me. There are multiple things at play here, that man did similar things with Syrian kids etc. Ultimately the reason why he did it is because he could and I blame the nonexistent fact checking at Spiegel for this. But on a more personal level Relotius said he couldn’t stand the pressure of not delivering a great story (he won multiple awards first). I would also blame these awards for beeing to trusting, somebody like him should never have reached this level of fame and reputation. I never really read his stuff, but I remember reading one story a long time ago that had someone start singing a song and I remembered wondering if this really happended or if I am in the realm of phantasy there. Now I know. The problem is incentives, always
  • woodpanel 8y ago
    The problem is incentives, always As a German living in Hamburg, where three of the main German publications (Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Der Stern) are produced (and Die Bild as well as Die Welt were also until recently), having worked with as well as being friends with a lot of people working there, I can assure you: it's not just incentives for the author, but also incentives for other people in the news organization(s) at work here. The author's completely made up stories about, e.g. ... - an American women who is traveling the whole country voluntarily, so that the quorum of one person being present at an execution for it to happen is met - an innocent Syrian boy who thinks he caused the civil war - an American town at the Mexican border, that is openly racist and full of dumb backwater, redneck folk ... feed into a commonly shared narrative. Those kind of elegantly written stories serve to immortalize these world-views held by many working at those companies. Veterans of Der Spiegel were quick to point out, that in their days of working there, it would have been impossible to get even one of his reports pass the inhouse fact checkers and attribute this current blindsightedness to the rise of constructivism amongst journalists.
    • oldgradstudent 8y ago
      > rise of constructivism amongst journalists. In what sense do you use constructivism here? I assume it's not mathematical constructivism.
• manfredo 8y ago
  When I read news articles about topics with which I am familiar, I encounter plenty of statements that strike me as basically false. Consider this excerpt from the New York Times' piece of Donald Knuth [1]: > Following Dr. Knuth’s doctrine helps to ward off moronry. He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee. Calling the idea that code should be readable by humans "almost twee" just makes me think that the writer has no idea what they're talking about. Sure, there are times when people write crap code, but being readable by humans is the whole reason why we built coding languages. Not to mention, the average readability of code has probably increased over time, not decreased. The author is basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation, to the detriment of the credibility of the rest of the article. It's nowhere near the magnitude of the fabrications in Der Spiegel of course, but it does seem to be the case that writers are willing to trust their own prejudices without fact checking. I was able to spot when those prejudices in the above example but only because I have relevant domain knowledge. It makes me wonder, how many times do I swallow the BS without knowing it? It's just a matter of how small (or big) of a statement they're willing to make without verifying it's veracity. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algorithms-programming.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-comp...
  • munificent 8y ago
    Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
    • fromthestart 8y ago
      I immediately thought the same thing. But then I thought, not being a subject matter expert doesn't give you an excuse to write bullshit. I think people who study the arts are less likely to have experience with and understand complex systems and, because of the different structure of knowlege in a subject like journalism, it's easier to be overconfident in one's knowlege. Especially when extended to topics like physics which require mathematics to truly understand.
• refurb 8y ago
  I’ll bet that’s exactly it. “Everyone knows how backwards the rural US is. Article makes sense completely! Publish it!”
  • hopler 8y ago
    So strange. If everyone knows it, it's not news, so why publish it?
    • adventured 8y ago
      You publish it so that the people that believe it - and are currently very angry - can enjoy the confirmation of their bias and roll around in it to great pleasure. A quick example of this in action. A friend of mine is irrationally partisan when it comes to being a Democrat. The party can do no wrong; all wrongs are ignored, without exception. Hillary Clinton was her unicorn politician that was to change everything bad about the world, she cried for weeks about the election loss. Then she moved on to attacking any of her friends she suspected of supporting Trump. When that wasn't enough to sate the anger and hurt, she moved on to demanding proof of loyalty - proof that you didn't support Trump and did support Hillary (Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein supporters were also evil). She loves any documentary or media she can get her hands on about lesser educated / poor white people in America (she is a white person, and grew up in poor Appalachia). She loves to make fun of them; these are people she hates. It confirms her existing bias and makes everything feel better by reinforcing what she believes about politics generally and the 2016 election specifically. It gives her a villain group to blame any negative situation on (identity politics practically requires groups to designate as evil or bad, to properly establish the framework).
    • assblaster 8y ago
      It sells.
• thomasz 8y ago
  It worked so well because it rhymed perfectly with widespread stereotypes about America. It looks like he did this in almost all of his articles. He always wrote a compelling story that just happened to perfectly fit into the worldview of the urban upper middle class in Germany.
• mikestew 8y ago
  Maybe they were too willing to believe his depiction of small town America as a bunch of poorly educated, bigoted hicks? That’s the part that annoys me most. You want bigoted hick towns? As of twenty years ago, I could have rattled off a half-dozen towns in Indiana that would have qualified (though the author’s pre-conceived image would have been a stretch for even these towns). I can’t believe that in twenty years they’ve all turned into liberal enclaves. But that would have taken more work and research, so pick an innocent town on the map and write your narrative about them instead? And if all places, Minnesota? Of all of small town America, I picture MN as probably most “liberal”, for lack of a better description, though I admit little data. I dunno, in the end I’m annoyed that the reporter didn’t even do a very good job of faking it, and a small town of what are probably nice folks (“damned good folks”?) took the hit.