This is an example of how legitimate and professional news services react when they get scammed into printing false information. They issue corrections and investigate the reporter's past work. (Ullrich Fichtner, SPIEGEL legt Betrugsfall im eigenen Haus offen Spiegel Online 19.12.2018; English version: DER SPIEGEL Reveals Internal Fraud Spiegel International)
The German version includes additional links on the scandal.
Der Spiegel is a highly regarded German weekly that is frequently quoted in English-language media. They also have an Engligh-language site. The fact that they are doing the right thing documenting their own failure, though, doesn't make it any less embarrassing. The reporter in question, Claas Relotius, was a star reporter who had received several prestigious German journalistic awards. As it happened, the scamming blew up on him with a recent story about private militia nutball groups in America doing vigilante patrols on the Mexican border. A fellow Spiegel reporter who worked on the story in Mexico, Juan Moreno, started raising warning flags over what he recognized as questionable reporting in the published story.
It's also notable that Spiegel's long, self-critical article admits that the company managers were initially more inclined to be angry at Moreno than at Relotius when Moreno started raising what turned out to be very ligitimate concerns:
On Sunday, Moreno sent an initial list of three questions about Foley's photo and other elements in the story and Relotius was then confronted with those questions. He defended himself brilliantly and cunningly. Indeed, his response was so eloquent, even admitting to imperfections in his work, that Moreno began looking like the troublemaker.This seems to be a universal dilemma for whistle-blowers!
The closing paragraph conveys a mood of rueful bitterness at the magazine journalistic failure with Relotius:
Relotius' story, his method, was nothing more than rearranging material that wasn't his. Along with some details that he invented. He made use of images, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and he borrowed material from old newspapers and obscure blogs. He assembled all these pieces and splinters and shreds and crumbs to create his characters. Chris Jaeger, Gayle Gladdis, Neil Becker from Fergus Falls, Nadim and Khalid in Kirkuk, Ahmed and Alin from Aleppo, Mohammed Bwasir from Guantanamo, they were not human beings made of flesh and blood. They only live on paper, and their creator was Claas Relotius. Sometimes he made them sing, sometimes he made them cry and sometimes he had them pray. And if he felt like it, as in "Jaeger's Border," he had his main character shoot into the night with an assault rifle. Because it made such a wonderful ending to his work of fiction.I read the militia article, "Jaeger's Border", when it came out a couple of weeks ago. I can't say that I saw anything that I could clearly see were factual errors. Which is why we need to be able to rely on news organizations to maintain high standards, since factual errors normally won't be clear to people who don't have immediate knowledge of the situation being reported. But I did come away thinking it was sloppy reporting, because it seemed to take the stories the far-right militia goons told them at face value. I wondered if the reporters had made any effort to verfiy their claims about themselves or their identities. As it turns out, one of the problems with the story is that the "Jaeger" of the title seems to be a name Relotius made up for one of his characters - or at least borrowed from a Mother Jones story.
They also made corrections to an article about the last surviving participant in the famous White Rose anti-Nazi resistance group, Traute Lafrenz, who was also once the girlfriend of Hans Scholl: Letzte Überlebende der "Weißen Rose". Lafrenz-Interview vom Fall Relotius betroffen 20.12.2018.
This was another story - in this case an interview - that I had read in the hardcopy magazine recently. It was an intriguing interview. I didn't notice any red flags in this one when I read it. And in this case, the corrections dealt with rhetorical flourishes that Relotius may have added himself, but not substantive claims. For instance, in a follow-up after the problems with Relotius' reporting came to light Lafrenz told Spiegel that she had not referred to meetings held by a particular teacher as "secret," which is how Relotius reported it. Lorenz' daughter-in-law, who was present in the house when Relotius interviewed Lorenz, said that he had recorded the interview on his mobile phone. But Relotius told Spiegel during the investigation of his misrepresentations that he did not have a recording of the interview.
The German channel ZDF carried this report on the scandal, Relotius-Skandal beim SPIEGEL: Was muss sich ändern? 20.12.2018:
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