Der Spiegel published around 60 stories from a fraudster

http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case-answers-to-the-most-important-questions-a-1244653.html

by doener • 8 years ago

171 106 8 years ago

simias• 8 years ago

Only tangentially related but do we have any recent update on the situation with Bloomberg's "backdoored motherboard" story? Last I heard Apple was vehemently asking for them to retract the story but I haven't heard anything after that. Have there been new developments?

Seems crazy that such an important and far reaching news story ends up... basically just nowhere.

ghaff2• 8 years ago

At this point, I'd bet that the story will just fade away. Bloomberg's editors obviously think that they have credible sources for the story but they can't reveal who they are. The various hardware vendors are obviously equally convinced that the story isn't true. It seems unlikely that either group are going to change their minds.

detaro3• 8 years ago

No update as far as I know. One would hope Bloomberg has re-checked what they have, but without them or their source revealing more details impossible to verify.

jlgaddis2• 8 years ago

Most recent news I'm aware of (8 days ago): "Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards" [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654998

nothis2• 8 years ago

I don't know why I should trust Super Micro investigating Super Micro.

I understand that Apple is bullish about there not being any evidence of their current hardware being compromised but it seems to me like it doesn't prove it never ever happened anywhere.

notmyaccount• 8 years ago

I think it's reporter misinterpreting what sources said.

Cause if there was indeed "backdoored motherboard", it'd be very easy to produce the said device and say "Look!".

jcranberry• 8 years ago

They're doing their own investigation, IIRC another reporter is attempting to replicate the findings.

oaiey• 8 years ago

And it came out by a US border militia report. I count the hours till it will be picked up by the US political system. DER SPIEGEL is not exactly a conservative magazine.

ajmurmann2• 8 years ago

Pretty much nothing in Germany is conservative by US standards.

doener7• 8 years ago

The AfD is our „Trump party.“

slededit• 8 years ago

The laws around business (and noise) on Sunday’s seem very traditional. A lot of US conservatives would love to bring that back.

detaro3• 8 years ago

It's not particularly left-leaning either though, unless it's changed a lot recently.

doener7• 8 years ago

DER SPIEGEL has a tradition of left and right-wing reporting alongside, but always critical of the people in power. Spiegel‘s founder Rudolf Augstein is famous for his proverb „Im Zweifel links“, though — which translate to: „When in doubt: left-leaning.“

doener7• 8 years ago

The whole story in German: http://m.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/fall-claas-relotius-...

I recommend DeepL for translation:

https://www.deepl.com/

jannes• 8 years ago

What's wrong with a human translation?

doener7• 8 years ago

Is there one published? I‘m not aware of an English version of the whole article.

amaccuish• 8 years ago

Wow I hadn't come across DeepL before, much more accurate for the languages I use than Google/Bing/Yandex.

coldcode• 8 years ago

Deepl is really decent, I checked out the English-German translation. I used to send Google's attempts to my (born in Germany) mom for laughs.

nothis2• 8 years ago

Text auto-translation has come a long way, this is seriously impressive. It completely re-arranges sentence structure to make it read right in English.

bomanbot• 8 years ago

Most of the articles about it are in German, but the Spiegel published an article answering the most important questions in English as well:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case-answer...

yorwba• 8 years ago

That's TFA.

all2• 8 years ago

What is 'TFA'?

shadowtree2• 8 years ago

Not the first time in the German-speaking journalism world, Tom Kummer was another famous example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Kummer).

The key is that access to really great international stories is super hard for journalists from smaller markets. They benefit though from publishing their stuff in local language, so no one notices. I bet that there is far more of this going on, this guy just got too big due to his awards.

Audiences in local markets thirst for bigger than life stories, in local language. Simply translating NYT does not work.

Whenever you read articles that mimic a very literary, prosaic style I'd be very careful. All those young journos read David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson, plus all the great Pulitzer pieces. But, then they sit somewhere in boring Middle-Germany and either a) write boring local stuff or b) make up grandiose stories.

Note that this has a long tradition in Germany, starting with famous author Karl May, who wrote legendary adventure books about the Wild West and the Orient - while never leaving Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May). Those books were written in a style suggesting being travel diaries, making a lot of readers believe in him being a real protagonist.

blfr2• 8 years ago

Sabrina Erdely wrote for perhaps the biggest market in the world, with near complete freedom to choose where and what to report.

It's unfair to malign smaller market journalists. Some, and I bet not few, journalists go into this profession to be propagandists for their cause, whatever it is.

danso10• 8 years ago

Erdely wasn't accused of fabricating stories/sources, AFAIK. She was found to have been too trusting and sloppy in her reporting about someone who herself was fabricating stories.

lixtra• 8 years ago

Whenever you read articles that mimic a very literary, prosaic style I'd be very careful.

This rules out whole newspapers like ‘Zeit’. Also ‘Spiegel’ is known for its special style.

azinman2• 8 years ago

German is hardly a tiny little local language. Yes it’s not English or Chinese, but it’s big enough (as is Der Spiegel) that you can’t blame fraud on language barriers...

matt40773• 8 years ago

The mechanism OP posits, and which SPIEGEL actually mentions in their reporting, is that subjects would tend to ignore these stories because they either did not notice them due to the language barrier, or did not much care about them due to their unfamiliarity of SPIEGEL and its low importance for the US market.

shadowtree2• 8 years ago

As they now reveal, he actively refused to have his articles translated into English - to prevent international audiences and subjects to expose him.

I am Austrian. The German speaking world is not the center of the universe, it is provincial.

danso10• 8 years ago

Karl May's lifetime ended in 1912. I'm not an expert on German history, but I can't imagine he was the very first German author to have fanciful tales, nor does it mean that Germany has a journalistic tradition of wholesale fabrication, compared to other countries/cultures. Joseph Pulitzer lived that same timespan and he was one of the main creators of "yellow journalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer

southerndrift• 8 years ago

If you like the irony, Der Spiegel is dissecting Karl May here: http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/karl-mays-echte-orientreise...

oska• 8 years ago

while never leaving Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May)

Hmm. The wikipedia article you linked describes him traveling to Sumatra, Egypt and North America.

gadders• 8 years ago

Sounds like Johan Hari in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

scandox• 8 years ago

And Jayson Blair in the US

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

sftwds• 8 years ago

And Stephen Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass

A very good film Shattered Glass was made about it.

AndyMcConachie• 8 years ago

Good on Der Spiegel for bringing this into the light. This happens in journalism and the best thing we can do is encourage this kind of truthfulness on the part of Der Spiegel.

The last thing we want to do is punish Der Spiegel for coming out with this information as it would only disincentivize them and other newspapers from doing so in the future.

danso10• 8 years ago

It's impossible to imagine Der Spiegel or any mainstream publication not doing a thorough explanation (and investigation) into allegations this egregious. Even in today's reality of eviscerated local journalism budgets, regional/local outlets still finance and publish investigations when a journalist has confessed to being a fabricator or plagiarist.

For example, last month, the Houston Chronicle hired an outside journalist to review 744 stories spanning 4 years after a reporter resigned in response to allegations: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/article/Following-inv...

rv-de3• 8 years ago

I think they just realized that this will surface sooner or later anyway and it will be very, very humiliating and embarrassing when this happens on a rivaling outlet like sueddeutsche.de.

This guy was able to do his thing for way too long - this says a lot about how "careful" journalism is produced there.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 8 years ago

Why not just assume good faith for a change? It's also more plausible: both the guy and the publisher would have had an interest in keeping this secret, giving the prospect far better chances than you're suggesting.

Their coverage today was also about as extensive as, say, 9/11. They could easily gotten ahead of it by releasing just one story, somewhere below the fold.

They also published at noon, their busiest time of the day (people checking the news during their break). On a Wednesday. Release it Friday or Saturday evening (i. e. "Take out the trash day") and far fewer people will see it.

matt40773• 8 years ago

It's too bad their main story on this isn't available in translation. It is, ironically, one of the most thrilling stories I've read in a while.

Here are some nuggets, although I cannot do the original justice:

He fabricated impossible-to-verify "facts", such as quotes or other, often tangential, factoids

Many times, some eerily apt song was somehow involved (playing on the radio, sung by passing child etc). They write it's impossible to miss if you read all his stories at once, but wasn't noticed in the normal, daily flow with sometimes months passing between stories

He was caught by a colleague sharing a byline on the US/Mexico border. He survived a first round of accusation by being very convincing, but the colleague used a trip to the US to collect incriminating information that was impossible to dismiss. There was apparently lots of scepticism of the accuser, which they openly admit.

The SPIEGEL has 60 fact-checkers, but they have not had the mandate to search for intentional, bad-faith acts such as this. The reasoning is(/was) that fact-checking involves a lot of cooperation requiring trust, and that relationship would be destroyed by a fundamentally adversarial model.

Every single fact that can be checked, is. For one (weekly) issue, they counted 1,000 edits made in this process (with about half of them being stylistic, typos, etc.). Examples they give:

- "<Whatevertown> is a sleepy city of 2,446, an hour outside of Memphis" => They check the distance on Google maps, the headcount in US government data. They don't check the sleepiness.

They would "not investigate the journalist, but only their story". An example for what they don't do is checking rental car bills and if they fit the places the journalist claims to have visited (see above for reasoning)

If you want to help me do some sleuthing, I have a question: In one article, he portraits an American woman and describes a scene where she supposedly "locked her front door, turning the key three times". From my time in the US, I seem to remember door locks having a mechanism somewhat different than they have in Germany, namely one where it would not be possible (or increase security) to make three full turns of the key. IIRC, a second turn would actually unlock the door?

GauntletWizard• 8 years ago

Most US locks are Schlage or kwikset (personal experience, but backed by [1]) - both require only a single turn and are direct locking - turn to the left locks, to the right unlocks, if it's already in the position you're trying to set it will only do a quarter turn, and the key must be in the upright position to remove. I would be very surprised to encounter a European style lock, but it may be that some regions prefer them (I'm in the northwest, having previously lived in the east coast metroplex)

[1] http://www.locksmithsecurityservices.com/2016/06/top-5-lock-...

alistairSH• 8 years ago

My experience is the same - door deadbolts are as you describe.

Locking knobs are a bit different, in that some have a deadbolt function, but most just lock-up the knob itself (to prevent turning). Regardless, these aren't often used as the primary means of securing an exterior door - there's almost always a deadbolt.

creaghpatr• 8 years ago

He fabricated impossible-to-verify "facts", such as quotes or other, often tangential, factoids
Many times, some eerily apt song was somehow involved (playing on the radio, sung by passing child etc). They write it's impossible to miss if you read all his stories at once, but wasn't noticed in the normal, daily flow with sometimes months passing between stories

This kind of tangental factoid reminds me of people who tweet things like "My 8 year old just asked me..." - everyone knows they are fabricating it but the stakes are so low it ends up being a joke, which evolved into the "woke toddler" meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/woke-toddler

I call it "cheap contextualization". It's rampant with journalists on Twitter who are not limited by their editors.

Tomte2• 8 years ago

The original German article is a bit too self-congratulatory for my taste. It's basically "we've got great, ethical journalists, a fantastic documentation department, and despite industry-leading defenses we were defrauded by him. Oh, did we mention how great we are?".

Sure, it's good you unveiled that. But in your article you're writing yourself how the first colleague to suspect something was stone-walled, had to fear for his job, got no support from superiors and investigated on his own money.

Maybe tone it down a bit.

PavlovsCat4• 8 years ago

I don't think they're even half aware of the awful consequences this will have. "Reichsbürger" and assorted "fake news" enthusiasts basically have been handed all they need from here on out -- like pouring some kind of synthetic super fuel on a fire we weren't able to deal with as is.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 8 years ago

If a magazine disclosing it was fooled by one of its journalists makes anyone believe they live in the year 1935 and the illuminati are coming for their strategic tin-foil reserves then it's still not the media's fault.

rv-de3• 8 years ago

As a German I have to say that Spiegel and spiegel.de aren't good journalism outlets and haven't been since many years ago. If I want well made journalism with actual investigative activities I'll resort to sueddeutsche.de, correctiv.org or nzz.ch.

Remember the Schulz-train "phenomenon" suddenly emerging last year? I stumbled upon it the first on spon and I am convinced they basically just invented it. And I am saying that as somebody voting for SPD.

rtomanek• 8 years ago

Since I am trying to not let my German become too rusty, what would you recommend as a German news source that is somewhat free of a political agenda, so not leaning to the right or to the left too much?

Ideally just news, or news in context but no unbalanced editorials, opinion pieces or political or social agenda. It is the last one I am struggling with finding.

Also no cheap drama, preferably being positive in general.

No popular science, too.

Not shallow.

doener7• 8 years ago

The Schulzzug was invented on Reddit.

lqet4• 8 years ago

Exactly my thoughts. Also, I definitely do not like the self-righteous and pompous shaming they are now doing. If you read the original German article(s!) on spiegel.de, Claas Relotius is painted as this criminal mastermind, "one of the journalistic idols of his generation" (as a German, I have never heard of him), because only a nefarious genius could've been able to do something like this the "Spiegel" and circumvent all these "great" safeguard mechanisms. They cite internal emails by him, which is just bad taste. They are even trying to introduce the term "a Relotius" as a synonym for journalistic fraud into the German language, as in: "this was a classic Relotius". It's pathetic.

I cannot help getting the impression that the Spiegel employees perceive themselves as some kind of high priests of democracy, and what Relotius did was not only high treason, but blasphemy. Sure, responsible journalism is important for any healthy society, but a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - common practice. Additionally, as others have mentioned, calling the "Spiegel" a defender of high-quality journalism would've been true 20 years ago, but today is quite a stretch.

Relotius may have massively overdone it, but come on - the guy visited a high security prison in Kurdistan to interview someone, so at least try to be fair.

danso10• 8 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree that Der Spiegel could be more humble in its tone (I can't tell, not being able to read its indepth explanation in the original German). But I don't believe that Relotius deserves any sympathy or leeway if these allegations are true. Fabrication is a far bigger transgression than "massively overdone" it. What does visiting a high security prison in Kurdistan have to do with anything?

ghaff2• 8 years ago

a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - common practice

For a serious newspaper, new magazine, TV news show, etc. that's purporting to report a news story absolutely not. For example, the Boston Globe has suspended or fired columnists over the years who were found to have fabricated some facts in their columns.

That said, the context does matter. Certainly there's no shortage of books based on some experience of the author's that merge characters and otherwise make changes to improve the narrative flow. But these aren't presented as reporting.

weinzierl2• 8 years ago

I couldn't agree more. During daytime in Germany they had the top three slots on their front page covered with stories about Relotius. "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste" taken by heart.

I only read half of the top story which has more than 6500 words. Most of it is written in a style as if it was breaking news about Relotius and not about DER SPIEGEL. They are almost self-congratulatory that they caught a fraudster.

Where there is a hint of self-criticism they don't fail to shrug it off with lame excuses:

DER SPIEGEL will appoint a commission [...] to avoid that this will happen again. It cannot be avoided, even with the best of intentions. Journalism is, like everything else, to borrow a word from Heinrich von Kleist, subject to the "frailness of the world". And the human being who is engaged in journalism will always be and remain fallible. [1]

Yes, the "frailness of the world" is to blame. Got it.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/fall-claas-relotiu...

DER SPIEGEL wird eine Kommission berufen [...] um Wiederholungsfälle zu vermeiden. Ausschließen lassen sie sich, auch bei bestem Willen, nicht. Der Journalismus unterliegt, wie alles, um ein Wort von Heinrich von Kleist zu leihen, der "Gebrechlichkeit der Welt". Und auch der Mensch, der Journalismus treibt, wird immer fehlbar sein und bleiben.

powercf2• 8 years ago

My interpretation is that the Spiegel chiefs want to make an example out of Relotius, to send a message to other journalists, that they must stick to the facts, or they will suffer the same fate. I don't think Class Relotius will be writing for any serious magazines or newspapers in the coming years. He may leave journalism and find another use for his talent as a writer. How can a newspaper or magazine ensure the veracity of its writers? Losing your career if you are found to lie seems like a good strategy.

Yes, the "frailness of the world" is to blame. Got it.

People are flawed. Der Spiegel could send pairs on every assignment, but the problem would still exist. What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?

usrusr• 8 years ago

It certainly reads that way. But please, let them indulge in their fifteen minutes of self-righteousness: if that's what it takes to avoid a coverup, it is a very small price to pay.

danso10• 8 years ago

Because Der Spiegel publishes primarily in German, it was hard to even find the articles that Relotius wrote, even though DS says the articles will remain as-is until the conclusion of their investigation.

I did find on Twitter someone from Fergus Fall, MN, blogging a response to a feature story by Relotius, a story purportedly about Trump's America. The list of complaints seems quite convincing:

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

An example of an allegedly-fabricated fact:

Perhaps the oddest fiction in a list of many is Relotius’ depiction of Bremseth as someone who “would like to marry soon…but he has not yet been in a serious relationship with a woman. He has also never been to the ocean.”
We can attest that Bremseth has indeed been to the ocean, by his account, “many times” and is currently happily involved in a multi-year, cohabitational relationship with a woman named Amanda. In fact, here’s a picture of the two of them in front of, all things, an ocean.

netsharc2• 8 years ago

Wow, reading their debunking, what that journalist did is fucking disgusting. The Spiegel article mentions the whole office is in shock, I can imagine, it's probably like realizing your wonderful spouse has been having an affair for the last 10 years.

It makes me think of this lady's TED talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg, and how that journalist [wait why am I referring to him as a journalist, he's a fraudster], how that fraudster is just making up his own story and presenting it as the truth, painting a an imaginary world for his readers' minds which they would accept as reality.

Sadly that's what lazy journalism and fake newsmakers do as well, so much that some people are convinced of the existence of FEMA death squads and a child porn ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant...

danso10• 8 years ago

I'm definitely someone of low ambition and likely low imagination, but I've never understood the desire as a journalist to fabricate when, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. For the sake of argument, let's assume that places like Fergus Falls, MN, are actually representative of the communities responsible for Trump's victory, and that Trump's victory, to the Der Spiegel readership, is a "bad thing".

The obvious "duh" narrative is that everyone in Fergus Fall is a multiple-gun-toting, sex-repressed hillbilly who wouldn't know the difference between or even the existence of Germany and Russia. Such a caricature is more "viral"/tweetable. But if you as a journalist wanted to raise the alarm about the rise of Trumpism, the far more disturbing story would be one depicting Fergus Falls as the "normal" and non-extreme place that it ostensibly is. Because that would imply the scenario of the "good German", where people are uncaring of the purported evil until it's too late.

That the Der Spiegel reporter went for fabricating schlock is, to me, indicative not just of his total lack of ethics, but also shallowness of thought, though maybe the two things are highly correlated.

doener7• 8 years ago

Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

lsh• 8 years ago

I just finished reading that piece and it was really good. This (Spiegel) author really spun the most outrageous lies.

masonic• 8 years ago

Remember when the Pulitzer-winning Washington Post series "Jimmy's World" turned out to be a fabrication?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Cooke

ElijahLynn• 8 years ago

Good on them for being transparent about this. They could have handled that in a much more secretive way.

user2426679• 8 years ago

The fraudster was named CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiege...

Der Spiegel published around 60 stories from a fraudster

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