No you’re the fake news
It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL’s best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: “It wasn’t about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure.” And: “The pressure not to fail grew as I became more successful.”
That crude mishmash, which looked like masterful works of feature writing, transformed him into one of the most successful journalists in Germany in recent years. It earned Relotius the German Reporter Prize on four different occasions, the Peter Scholl Latour Prize and the Konrad-Duden, the Kindernothilfe and the Catholic and Coburger media awards. He was named CNN “Journalist of the Year,” he was honored with the Reemtsma Liberty Award, the European Press Prize and he even landed on the Forbes magazine list of the “30 under 30 – Europe: Media.” One wonders how he could endure the praise at the award ceremonies without running out of the hall in shame.
Well, there are people like that. I constantly wonder how Trump isn’t curled into a ball on the floor in shame, but I also know it’s foolish to keep wondering. It’s who he is.
So now the Trump ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is making hay with the story.
Since the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel disclosed a fabrication scandal that has sent tremors through the news world at a tense time for journalists globally, Grenell has taken aim at the company.
He has tweeted about Der Spiegel, often harshly, and retweeted the criticism leveled by others, more than a dozen times in the past week.
“Spiegel hasn’t answered as to how this fraud happened,” he wrote, for example, on Dec. 23, apparently dissatisfied with the company’s somewhat extensive efforts to publicize the wrongdoings of the reporter, Claas Relotius. “It’s absurd for them to pretend this is only about one reporter.”
Yes, that’s definitely how ambassadors to friendly countries are supposed to behave.
Grenell wrote an incendiary letter to Der Spiegel, which it published on its site, in which he asked the company to arrange for an outside organization to conduct a thorough investigation of what went wrong.
“These fake news stories largely focused on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people,” Grenell wrote. “While Spiegel’s anti-American narratives have expanded over the last years, the anti-American bias at the magazine has exploded since the election of President Trump.”
Surprise surprise. Trump is a crook, a liar, a sadist, a bully, and an empty sack of wind, so a country that puts him at the top of government has something badly wrong with it. It’s not “anti-American bias” to pay a lot of attention to Trump.
Trump, who has made undermining otherwise credible news reporting a central effort of his presidency, has often claimed, without evidence, that reporters make up their sources.
Against this backdrop, the Relotius affair has predictably fueled a long-standing right-wing campaign to criticize media whose reporting is not friendly to Trump.
Shawn Steel, the committeeman of the Republican National Committee in California, tweeted about it on Christmas, calling it the “German Fake News” that was guilty of “hating” Trump and America.
Home of Fox News and Breitbart.
I’m waiting for Trump to state that this story is proof of collusion between Germany and Crooked.
This story is a disgrace for Der Spiegel. If Trump’s minions are making hay of it, it’s on Der Spiegel. Shame on them for making “fake news!” seem legitimate.
How can they spend a bunch of money to send a reporter to live in Minnesota for weeks and then fact check absolutely nothing, allowing a story full of lies, invented characters, and people who lent their names or images to fictional characters:
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7
@#2:
Obviously, his true calling was as a novelist.
;-)
Let this be a warning to us all.
The people you need to monitor most are those on your team. Opportunists will arise everywhere. It’s the reason progressive politics is plagued with selfish actors, heavily disguised. Basically it’s the affinity con.
The conservative side hardly bothers to pretend to give a damn, they are openly cynical, exploiting human weakness without so much as a twinge of guilt. To a conservative blaming the victim of a scam comes naturally. Many will see it as the manifestation of natural selection. They’re past masters of deriving ought from is. Especially when the is itself is a dubious interpretation of in this case evolution.
We can’t prevent either human weakness or downright psychopathic exploitation occurring, all we can do is be vigilant. Also of course is the sheer gall of the conservatives piling on any case of malpractice by individuals in the somewhat honest press in the context of
to name but two.
The only solace I can provide is the observation that man bites dog is always bigger news than dog bites man.
It’s an appalling story. I’d always trusted Der Spiegel – intelligent magazine and when it writes about something I know about a bit, it is fine. I thought it a cut above most UK publications.
@Skeletor – that Medium story is excellent, and the couple who did their own investigation seem really nice and sane.
Does anyone remember Tom McMaster, who pretended to be a Syrian woman blogging from a revolutionary Damascus? Once he was exposed you could read his dispatches and see that he was very low on specific detail e.g. names of streets and buildings, which would be something you would mention if you were in riots in a city (“we were standing near the Bank of Syria headquarters and dived down Camel Alley” or something). Not this guy’s fabrications. He mentions names, places, all.
Its the price of infotainment. The amount of ‘reporting’ devoted to reinforcing generic sentiments is devastating. Every disaster has a lost dog, a still-standing cross, a ‘god burned down my neighbor’s house, not mine hallelujah!’
Remember Wolf Blitzer feeding an atheist intervewee the ‘you just have to thank the Lord’ line?
Heh; yep, I remember. Rebecca Vitsmun – I’m Facebook friends with her.
Now that I’m reminded, I do remember Tom McMaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gay_Girl_In_Damascus