There’s a bit of excitement about Claas Relotius, a reporter for Der Spiegel who has the bad habit of making everything up. In one case, he wrote a ” tendentious, malicious portrait” of a small town in Minnesota ( Fergus Falls), one chock-full of falsehoods. A couple of the locals went to some effort to show that he lied: not sure whether that contributed to his downfall or not.
Of course this is not the same as repeating or contributing to those lies that everyone is supposed to embrace. That’s normal: you can get a Pulitzer for those.. Relotius, on the other hand, was sick: just ask him.
I am reminded of the time that Bella Stumbo, a reporter for the Los Angeles times, wrote an article about the small Midwestern town I grew up in. My favorite bit was about the once-a-year trek of the farm families into town to buy supplies.
West Hunter 
Where in the midwest did you grow up?
East-central Illinois.
Not far from Detroit?
Look at a map.
I’ve heard all about him. But I don’t foresee any longer term effects on the MSM.
This has happened before, at NYT and, I think, the New Republic. The guys were fired, there was a few articles on it, then it was down the memory hole.
No MSM outlet has any motivation to keep the issue alive. They are all worrying they’ll be next. Best to just move on.
To be fair, the whole newspaper business is circling the drain. They used to be able to make enough money on ads to support papers in every little town in the US, along with the big players that could have foreign bureaus and such. But the internet basically destroyed their business model–online ads are way better than classified ads, Google and Facebook are much better ad platforms than paper newspapers, and the average age of people reading paper newspapers every day suggests not much future for that part of the business.
So they’re in a dying industry. Budgets and headcounts keep getting cut, and more and more writing is done by unpaid interns whose parents are supporting them while they try to break into this industry. (That’s a pretty dumb investment, since the industry is dying.) Unless someone figures out some way to make reporting the news pay, the endpoint is probably that news is reported by government news organizations (BBC), private-subscription-supported organizations (NPR), or organizations propped up by big donors as a prestige project or to buy influence (Washington Post).
I think that NYT is also surviving. It might be a target for some rich tech guy to buy, given its high reputation.
Mind you, I dumped after they hired Sarah Jeong, Not missing it at all.
In 1974, Bella Stumbo described Sullivan, Illinois as “too bland, too utterly wholesome to offer any intrigue whatsoever, merely an enlarged spot in an endlessly flat road, surrounded on all sides by lush cornfields.”
““too bland, too utterly wholesome to offer any intrigue whatsoever”: somebody hadn’t read Agatha Christie.
We had a murder once.
That same endlessly flat road extends to Minnesota, but winter makes it sinister:
Der Bus nach Fergus Falls fährt von Minneapolis nach Norden, vorbei an zugefrorenen Seen, vereisten Strommasten und Ackerland, flach bis an den Horizont.
[The bus to Fergus Falls goes north from Minneapolis past frozen lakes, ice-covered power poles and cropland flat all the way to the horizon.]
Note that flatness and straightness are design goals for the Interstate Highway System. But at the turnoff, a surprise:
Nach dreieinhalb Stunden biegt der Bus vom Highway ab auf eine schmale, abfallende Straße, rollt zu auf einen dunklen Wald, der aussieht, als würden darin Drachen hausen. Am Ortseingang, kurz vor dem Bahnhof, steht ein Schild mit dem amerikanischen Sternenbanner, darauf steht: “Welcome to Fergus Falls – Home of damn good folks”.
[After three and a half hours the bus turns off the Interstate onto an off ramp and approaches a dark forest that looks as if dragons might be lurking inside. At the entrance to the town, just before the station, stands a sign with the Stars and Stripes and the words “Welcome to Fergus Falls – Home of damn good folks”. ]
Der Spiegel, to its credit, has kept the original article online, with a disclaimer in bold type added at the top:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-150231550.html
Relotius’ problem is that he included too many gross lies in his story instead of sticking to the usual journalistic technique of just ignoring anything that doesn’t fit the narrative. It’s amusing to read the ongoing invention for fairy tales at Der Spiegel in the interest of damage control. For example, according to the following article that just appeared on their website, the editors are “shocked, shocked,” that such fake news could have slipped through their “layers of editors and fact checkers:”
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/der-fall-claas-relotius-wie-das-spiegel-sicherungssystem-an-grenzen-stiess-a-1244593.html
The first paragraph reads as follows:
“Any text that appears in the weekly SPIEGEL, whether printed or digital, is read by many colleagues before its publication: by at least one department head and one editor-in-chief, by staff in editing and the legal department. But the heart of quality control is the in-house documentation. The more than 60 colleagues – physicists, historians, biologists or Islamic scholars – ensure that names, dates and facts are correct, they verify every word and every number. Hardly any other news medium makes such an effort to live up to the claim: What we write is true. In the days of Fake News, documentation is something we take very seriously.”
Now look through the list of gross lies documented in the new famous Medium article:
View at Medium.com
As I’ve noted elsewhere, therein you will find set forth like ducks in a row virtually all of the crude, quasi-racist stereotypes of Americans the German media are so fond of cultivating. Americans as xenophobic racists? Check! Americans as prudes? Check! Americans as religious nuts? Check! Americans ignorant of the outside world? Check! Americans as militaristic? Check! Americans as thoughtless polluters of the environment? Check! and the list goes on. In short, Relotius’ “reporting” fits the narrative so well that one would have to be an imbecile not to see through it immediately – that or a denizen of the “layers of editors and fact checkers” at Der Spiegel.
If they employ Islamic scholars as fact checkers they have some huge issues with what “fact checking” means.
“the usual journalistic technique of just ignoring anything that doesn’t fit the narrative”
Yes, enforcing the narrative is exactly what those “layers of editors and fact checkers” are for. WaPo and the NYT are particularly bad in this area.
“…the usual journalistic technique of just ignoring anything that doesn’t fit the narrative…” My experiences certainly confirm this.
Back in the day, when I was doing research on homicide patterns, a reporter from the NYT contacted me for some background on the subject. We talked on the phone for about thirty minutes or so. The reporter spent the entire time attempting to have me agree, on the record, with assertions he made about homicides in the United States, which I thought were either completely false or egregious misrepresentations of reality. At some point, the reporter clearly grew frustrated with me and the conversation terminated.
The academic colleague who had steered this reporter in my direction later learned of our conversation. He mildly berated me for losing a golden opportunity to achieve fame and fortune. If I’d only gone along with the program, other reporters would soon have come calling, radio and TV spots would have followed along with invited oped pieces, and soon I would have become a nationally recognized expert on crime, and a regular talking head in various venues.
A grad school friend was an internationally recognized expert on migration and immigration. He regularly appeared on NPR and other venues to discuss issues involving the areas of his expertise. Then I noticed that he’d disappeared from the airwaves, magazines and newspapers. I asked him why and learned that his mortal sin had been to suggest that there might be disadvantages to unlimited immigration into the USA, e.g., lowered average wages and higher unemployment for unskilled workers. The p[eople whop had been interviewing him and inviting him to appaer on their programs and in their print media did not want to hear this and most certainly did not want their listeners, viewers and readers to consider these possibilities.
Relotius’ problem is merely that he needs a new pseudonym. Then he’ll be able to keep writing as before. There is still a market for his stories
July 30, 1974 LA Times, Bella Stumbo. Your town had that great “Little Theater” though! 🙂
I’m from a bit north of there. In the military I had a friend from near there – our ritual greeting was I’d name a random small town from there & he’d say some other random small town name near there. good times! America once was mainly towns like that. As America changes, some of those small towns still remain like that. the variability between those small towns & the “new” America increases.
“that great “Little Theater” – guess why that existed.
It led to weirdness like my brother;s third-grade teacher (whom he had a crush on) dating Forrest Tucker.
guessing the theater existed b/c the late Mr. Little wanted to bring high quality theater to east central IL (& maybe wanted to bring high quality “SWISH-er sweets” thru town?) just a hunch based on years of theater:) kudos to him for all his work, tho! his generation’s “don’t ask don’t tell” era was better for society than the current “pride parades/so brave” policy. of course, i guess quarantining’s off the table:)
It’s also telling which of his fake news the Fake News (capitalized) did not deign to highlight.
Can you say “Typical Standard Bad Journalism”, boys and girls? Yes I KNEW you could.
David’s Medienkritik, dedicated to exposing anti-American bias in German media, has been inactive for years, but recently published on the Relotius firing.SPIEGEL Reporter Fired for Inventing Stories – Some with Anti-American Tilt.
“Inaccurate” German reporting on the US is old news. From 2007, David’s Medienkritik had a brilliant take-down of another German journalist’s ignorant, inaccurate, deceitful characterization of the Amis. Markus Günther: Hypocritical Americans Suppressing Memories of Slavery-Other Injustices.
The article goes on to refute the ignorant,lying German journalist.
I remember that site! We both used to comment there. We grow old, my friend, even in internet-years.
The takedown on Medium was excellent, right up until the end, when the politically liberal authors revert to mostly believing the stereotypes about Trump supporters and making sure that the takeaway was “We’re not all like that here.” They actually did a little better than that, but it’s in there, and I am old and grouchy.
There’s been a couple of books written about the small south-mid-central-west town I grew up in; one captured well the smarmy hypocrisy of the sanctimonious bible thumpers who dominated the social landscape; the other one praised them as the unsung backbone of America. But neither author just made shit up.
What’s the big beef with hypocrisy anyhow. Does everyone prefer open, unashamed evil?
As our leftist friends might say, it’s not hypocrisy (a common human failing) that’s the problem, it’s hypocrisy + power. I live in an area where progressives have cultural hegemony, and being expected to smile and nod about their love of diversity even as they vent prejudices about rural whites is galling.
When a sufficient number of members are hypocritical about their group’s high ideals, it’s a tacit admission that those ideals are unobtainable or probably not desirable. Instead, they continue to push them in order to get accolades for their virtue; in other words, to gain further power.
Simple hypocrisy, or not being able to see how some of one’s actions belie one’s ideals (this is hard to do well) is not such a big problem.
oh man that was good, i really have to read him one day
Most people prefer goodness. Evil does not become good just because its authors can hide.
We all knew a kid at school whose dad works at Nintendo, who knows a secret ninja move called “the touch of death”, and who’s dating Miss Teen USA (you’ve never seen her because she goes to another school!) Sometimes that kid becomes a journalism major.
Once, you could blatantly make stuff up (“restaurants in Taiwan serve human fetuses!”) and nobody would ever catch you. I mean, who fucking knows what happens in Taiwan, right? The internet has made it easy to fact check stuff. But now that I think about it, the human fetus thing spread over the internet too…
If restaurants in Taiwan start serving human fetuses ( stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled) we will know who to blame. Offtimes, the only thing holding back evil is that the potential perps are too unimaginative to conceive of the crime.
I must admit that I have personally witnessed something that tends to support what Relotius wrote. True, it was mere anecdotal evidence, but, as I was driving out West, I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Montana is full. Go home!”
My favorite stay-away bumper sticker was from the 1970s: “Don’t Californicate Oregon”.
“Iffen it’s snowbird season, why cain’t we shoot ’em?”
Did anybody notice the irony that, when the German reporter wanted to find the worst-of-the-worst racists in America, he went to… the part of the US with the highest proportion of German ethnics? Because about half of the population there is of German descent (and most of the rest are Swedes or Danes).
Those Germans. They screw up EVERYTHING.
They wanted to find a high density Trump voters town. A place without touchy people who would sue them for slander. People that could be freely insulted. American Whites.
This was probably his downfall. So many of his falsehoods are of the stupid, detectable kind that he must have supposed that hicks can’t read German.
North Dakota and Wisconsin have the highest percentage of Germans, not Minnesota.
https://names.mongabay.com/ancestry/st-German.html
Minnesota is second only to North Dakota in proportion of Norwegians, especially near the border, as Fergus Falls is. (I happen to know of a bunch that went there from Høland, Akershus, Norway, and had gazillions of descendants.)
https://names.mongabay.com/ancestry/st-Norwegian.html
Why is it always Leftist reporters who make up stories? Is it because 90+% of reporters are Leftists, or is it because the Leftist narrative is so far removed from the reality of human nature, science, and economics that they have to make up stories in order to have something positive (from their point of view) to report?
Yeah, I too remember when the leftists pushed stories about Iraqi WMD. Damn the leftists, all of them.
Democrat Quotes on Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction
The wonderful thing about being in the elite is that you can be 100% wrong, make disastrous decisions, leave a trail of destruction behind you, and you still only fail upward.
Assuming that the above quotes represented the actual beliefs of the individuals quoted at the time they made the statements it is an astonishing record of stupidity.
Merry Christmas Greg!
This scandal reminds me of a nice essay by John Derbyshire, “Journalists are Scum”: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Culture/journalistsarescum.html
interestingly, the CNN site has not a single mention of this guy when you search his name. They once named him Journalist of the Year.
Happy New Year!
Off-topic: am curious about your thoughts on this, by N Taleb:
View at Medium.com
Steve Sailer had an article on it at Takimag. He would have a blog post too.
Thanks. I liked Steve’s take. Thought our dear leader/host might get his dollar in as well.
Taleb has a few wrong ideas: being anti-GMO, claiming nationality/nationalism are vacuous ideas (they’re not, but he’s being a typical Levantine about it, failing to see the need for intermediate layer between clan/tribe and humanity), and now this (IQ) and lack of race clustering.