The gun-toting, virgin City Administrator
December 20, 2018 7:14 AM   Subscribe

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You missed the kicker
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:20 AM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


The kicker is right there in the article?
"finally wrapped things up a few weeks ago, just in time to hear today that Relotius was fired when he was exposed for fabricating many of his articles"
posted by JonB at 7:28 AM on December 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


The kicker, by the way, is that today, the day after that post went up on Medium, Der Spiegel published a long, detailed admission that the reporter had been fabricating stories for years:
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."
A lot of what he reported seems, on reflection, to be pretty ridiculous, but his German audience ate it up, because it played to their stereotypes.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:29 AM on December 20, 2018 [16 favorites]


The kicker is right there in the article?
I guess it is! I missed it when I read the medium post this morning, because it's mentioned at the end of the 11th paragraph. They're not journalists, so I don't blame them for burying the lede!
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:33 AM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Wait, is there some kind of kicker that I should be aware of?
posted by BrashTech at 8:02 AM on December 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


The Kicker: Threat or Menace?
posted by Parasite Unseen at 8:18 AM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


All the guy's earlier articles on 'der Fledermausjunge' should have beed a dead giveaway.
posted by zaixfeep at 9:06 AM on December 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


The young journalist's crime isn't the most interesting part.

Hindsight is 20-20, and all, but so many of the fabricated details would have been easy to fact-check. Look up the city administrator's number and spend 2 minutes asking questions like "do you own a Beretta 9mm?".

Did that never happen, because Relotius knew too well which facts would get checked and which wouldn't, or did fact-checkers occasionally stumble across errors, ask for the one detail to be fixed, and fail to notice any pattern? Or did they notice but not have the support to investigate further?

Also, much of Der Spiegel's apology is good, but: "[Relotius] defended himself brilliantly and cunningly. Indeed, his response was so eloquent...." Oh, come on.

Also, sounds like a lot of awards juries screwed up.
posted by bfields at 9:12 AM on December 20, 2018 [11 favorites]


What gets me is -- judging from the extracts quoted by Der Spiegel -- how cheesy the writing is:
One early morning this summer, 13-year-old Alin, fatigue visible in her eyes, walks alone through the dark, pre-dawn streets of the Turkish city of Mersin. And she is singing. The slap of her flip flops accompanies her as she makes her way through the factory district, passing dilapidated buildings, with dogs still asleep and streetlights unlit. Alin is singing as she walks, a hopeful song about two children with little to hope for -- two children who had experienced the worst, but who were to be saved nonetheless.
Is this really what passes for quality journalism in Germany?
posted by verstegan at 9:13 AM on December 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


This interview about Der Spiegel's fact-checking department is interesting. In particular: "That’s one big difference with the American model, where the checker doesn’t get involved until the piece is finished or close to finished. Whereas you might be consulted even before the writer starts writing …" "Yesterday during the presentation there was a question about whether there is a conflict of interest because of this construction"
posted by bfields at 9:22 AM on December 20, 2018


I hereby award the writers of this marvelous takedown the John Cougar Mellencamp Medal of Righteous Small Town Fury
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:24 AM on December 20, 2018 [15 favorites]


How dare they insult my precious Minnesota!

Also, the story is really hilarious if you actually come from Minnesota. I would love it if we had some dark, eerie middle-European forests here, and if our bus stations were located in the forest. Also the guy who heats his beer in winter and the Western night with the marinated beef halves. Also the power plant that runs to six smokestacks and is right next to the diner.

It's a bit disappointing, because as a good Europhile I've been raised to believe that European journalism is better than American, that Europeans are better educated and more sophisticated than Americans and that Europeans know a lot about the US so their takes on us are good and right-on.
posted by Frowner at 9:30 AM on December 20, 2018 [23 favorites]


Also, Relotius is 33 and has been working there 7 years.

So, it kinda sounds like they hire young journalists and reward them based on how moving their stories are. And their supposedly huge fact-checking department actually turns out to be also working for journalists as researchers, and possibly no one in that department is devoted exclusively to skeptical review of stories?

Possibly I'm being unfair, it's not like I know what I'm talking about here, but, still, I wonder if further investigation would turn up more of this.
posted by bfields at 9:39 AM on December 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


He is not a farmer, he works next door in the coal-fired power plant, his hands are always black

Question for Der Spiegel's fact checkers: Do you think that coal-fired power plants in the U.S. are run by a bunch of guys manually shoveling coal into furnaces like it's the 19th century?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:43 AM on December 20, 2018 [22 favorites]


Also the guy who heats his beer in winter and the Western night with the marinated beef halves.

What gets me is that, knowing Fergus Falls, there were probably some real anecdotes available that would have seemed just as exotically American. I mean, dude couldn't find a meat raffle?

Whatever these people's favorite TV shows were, they'd probably be just as interesting answer as Game of Thrones, if not more interesting.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:45 AM on December 20, 2018 [21 favorites]


So, it kinda sounds like they hire young journalists and reward them based on how moving their stories are.

I’m not a journalist but I can definitely find them some very moving stories.
posted by gucci mane at 10:45 AM on December 20, 2018


Also the fact that there is a goddamn Applebees right behind the welcome to Fergus Falls sign, like you are being welcomed to both at the same time. How is the real thing that not the better story?
posted by dinty_moore at 10:55 AM on December 20, 2018 [9 favorites]


The last two non-fiction books I started reading both had pretty obvious factual errors. Given that the authors are trying to use these facts to advocate for policy positions I would have thought that someone along the way would have checked these things. I'm not sure if I'm going to resume reading them.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:58 AM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


The failure of the fact checking is what's really crazy to me.

In Der Spiegel's words,
Already, every text printed in DER SPIEGEL goes through a thorough fact-checking and vetting process to review the accuracy of every fact stated in an article. When Claas Relotius wrote in his first major feature for DER SPIEGEL, "At Home in Hell," that the city of Marianna is located "an hour by car west of Tallahassee" in northern Florida, a DER SPIEGEL fact-checker reviewed whether that detail was accurate.

When Relotius wrote that the small town has "three churches, two hunting clubs and a Main Street that stretches for miles between dilapidated low-rise buildings," that could also be reviewed thanks to the possibilities offered by the internet. But the problems with Relotius' articles relate not to details like that, but to his on-the-ground reporting.
[emphasis added]

But both the Spiegel article and the Medium post give way too many examples of "details like that" that could, actually, have been verified pretty easily.
posted by trig at 11:01 AM on December 20, 2018 [7 favorites]


I thought good fact checkers (ok, the New Yorker's fact checkers) called the people quoted in an article and checked information with them?

Somehow this story fills me with even more rage. Another motherfucking white guy skating his way to career acclaim and awards through laziness and lies. Grrr.
posted by medusa at 11:42 AM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


Minnesota's already weird enough, so why make up fake weirdness?
posted by heurtebise at 11:43 AM on December 20, 2018 [10 favorites]


Somehow this story fills me with even more rage. Another (expletive) white guy skating his way to career acclaim and awards through laziness and lies.
Not only that, but also giving ammunition to authoritarians who are engaged in a calculated and deliberate war on independent journalism by giving them a useful example of "fake news" they can use to discredit the entire profession.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:53 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


Der Spiegel sounds like they wanted these details of folksy small town Trump voting American rubes to be true to fit their storyline and wanted it so much they just looked it over and went “sounds about right.”
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:08 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


Two things that jumped out at me: What on earth is a marinated beef half? It sounds like an entire side of beef and if so, what do you marinate it in (not what marinade, but what kind of container)? Also, why would someone who grew up in Minnesota be a New England Patriots fan?
posted by TedW at 1:23 PM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


Generally, these articles seem to me like the journalistic version of "It's a dark and stormy night. Joe Smith looks at the sparrows as a dog barks in the distance. He is about to..."

They look like poor fiction, on stylistic grounds alone.
posted by Dumsnill at 1:33 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also, why would someone who grew up in Minnesota be a New England Patriots fan?

Pretty sure it was chosen because it has Patriot in the name.

I think the most unbelievable thing was the idea that all these Minnesotans were talking about politics with complete strangers with no preamble.
posted by dinty_moore at 1:41 PM on December 20, 2018 [7 favorites]


@daveweigel: Das Zerbrochenesglas
posted by Chrysostom at 2:13 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


He wrote an article with an invented conversation with Colin Kaepernick's parents and no one noticed?
posted by reductiondesign at 2:13 PM on December 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


So “Claes Relotius” is German for “Johann Hari”?
posted by acb at 2:57 PM on December 20, 2018


His own misery will now increase immeasurably because no one is going to believe a single word from him ever again.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:03 PM on December 20, 2018


Reminds me a bit of the final season of 'The Wire' when Templeton gits the Pulitzer.
posted by ovvl at 6:35 PM on December 20, 2018


The Fergus Falls article should be viewed as a story made up in response to a projective personality test. He went there, didn't find the story he expected, and made up his own. Unsurprisingly, it is a gothic fairy tale - a village hidden in the woods, inhabited by strange beings who feast on strange meats, and headed by a virginal hero, who has not yet started his quest.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 6:25 AM on December 21, 2018 [11 favorites]



The Fergus Falls article should be viewed as a story made up in response to a projective personality test. He went there, didn't find the story he expected, and made up his own. Unsurprisingly, it is a gothic fairy tale - a village hidden in the woods, inhabited by strange beings who feast on strange meats, and headed by a virginal hero, who has not yet started his quest.


That's exactly it! That's why the landscape is so compressed - the power plant next to the diner, for instance, and the way everyone goes to Western Night. I couldn't put my finger on what struck me as so strange at first, but the smallness of the setting is a stage setting or fairytale, where there's always only the castle, the woods, the king, the prince, the princess and the monster. Maybe a magic horse or a talking fox or a glass hill, but nothing else.

On a practical note, it would almost certainly be better, when writing these out-of-town/foreign journalist pieces, either to send two journalists or to partner with a regional sister publication. Two out of town journalists would at the very least talk to each other and check their perceptions a bit, and it might help to have someone else to think through tricky bits in the story rather than risk a lone journalist either lying out of self interest or simply panicking and making up the bus station.
posted by Frowner at 6:36 AM on December 21, 2018 [6 favorites]


On a practical note, it would almost certainly be better, when writing these out-of-town/foreign journalist pieces, either to send two journalists or to partner with a regional sister publication. Two out of town journalists would at the very least talk to each other and check their perceptions a bit, and it might help to have someone else to think through tricky bits in the story rather than risk a lone journalist either lying out of self interest or simply panicking and making up the bus station.
In at least some of the cases that is exactly what was done and in the case described in the "kicker" link in the first comment it came very close to destroying his co-author's career with Der Spiegel rather than Relotius':
The story "Jaeger's Border" would prove to be Relotius' undoing. It was one fabricated story too many, because this time, he had a co-author, who sounded the alarm while also collecting facts to counter his fiction. That co-author, Juan Moreno, has been traveling the world as a reporter for DER SPIEGEL since 2007. In the dispute with and surrounding Relotius, Moreno risked his own job, at times even desperately seeking to re-report his colleague's claims at his own expense. Moreno would go through three or four weeks of hell because his colleagues and senior editors in Hamburg didn't initially believe that Relotius could be nothing more than a liar.

In late November and into early December, some at DER SPIEGEL even believed that Moreno was the real phony and that Relotius was the victim of slander. Relotius skillfully parried all allegations and all of Moreno's well-researched evidence, constantly coming up with new ways of sowing doubt, plausibly refuting accusations and twisting the truth in his favor. Until, ultimately, his tricks stopped working.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:21 AM on December 21, 2018 [3 favorites]


Also, why would someone who grew up in Minnesota be a New England Patriots fan?

Pretty sure it was chosen because it has Patriot in the name.


Good point, but it would have been just a little more credible to make him a Cowboys fan; or a Yankees fan. Making the Yankees a football team would have been about right for that article. (Assuming the person who debunked it is truthful. They could be a dog for all I know.)
posted by TedW at 5:57 PM on December 21, 2018


In late November and into early December, some at DER SPIEGEL even believed that Moreno was the real phony and that Relotius was the victim of slander. Relotius skillfully parried all allegations and all of Moreno's well-researched evidence, constantly coming up with new ways of sowing doubt, plausibly refuting accusations and twisting the truth in his favor. Until, ultimately, his tricks stopped working.

So dude certainly has a skill. The question is, what was he doing in journalism?
posted by eviemath at 6:15 AM on December 22, 2018


Der Spiegel sent someone to apologize and do some actual reporting in Fergus Falls.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:29 PM on December 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


Now it turns out he was also allegedly soliciting donations to the Syrian orphans he invented.
posted by eponym at 5:27 PM on December 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


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