
The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town - jackfoxy
https://spectator.us/der-spiegel-small-town/
======
danso
People were right in the previous discussion [0] to criticize Der Spiegel's
self-serving sanctimonious tone in their writeup of the scandal. It's
impossible to read the allegations by the Fergus Falls residents here and
square them with Der Spiegel's purportedly high-performing fact-checking
operation. It's not just only that they failed to detect their reporter's
malicious deception. But they failed to do the most basic kind of fact-
checking. For instance, I could see them failing to get to the bottom of an
ephemeral fact like whether someone had put up a sign saying "Mexicans Keep
Out". But calling the city to confirm that the official city sign says "Home
of Damn Good Folks", and the theater to confirm that they were playing
"American Sniper" in 2017? Those are the kind of facts that at a bare minimum
professional fact-checkers should be double-checking.

Even something like the claim that the city administrator was a gun-toting
virgin is something that a fact-checker is expected to call and independently
confirm. And even if the guy gives a non-committal denial, e.g. _" That's
ridiculous, I don't want have anything to do with your left-wing fake news
article!"_, the fact-checker should be prying the reporter for all the
documentation/notes that support the claim. In fact, in this scenario, the
fact-checker should be highly suspicious that the city official is so
standoffish, if the reporter managed to gain his trust enough in the first
place to reveal that he's a virgin (and is ostensibly embarrassed about it).

Der Spiegel has a lot of questions it has to answer for how it failed so
thoroughly for so many years here.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716613)

~~~
jaabe
Most workplaces operate on a high amount of trust though, especially in
Western Europe. If you’ve achieved star-reporter status at der Spiegel, as
such that you’re sent 3 weeks to America to do investigative journalism, it
goes to reason, that you also meet a high amount of trust. So I think it’s
easy to see how the editorial staff might have missed the problem.

I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, we do a lot of internal reviewing
of employee behaviour. When things go wrong, it’s possible to steal 111
million danish kroner after all[0]. Despite our best efforts, things still do
go wrong though, and that’s because, even in the heart of bureaucracy, we
still rely on trust, and when people intentionally abuse it, shit happens.

It’s unfortunate, but things aren’t perfect. Everyone is pressed for financial
resources and then everything from financial security to editorial journalism
becomes patch-work “good enough” type systems. Because the perfect system
simply doesn’t exist. One of my user accounts has a lot of privileges for
instance, more than it rightly should. It’s like that because I need access to
so many different things, that our IT-department would need a half-time hire
if they were to keep my user rights for our 500 different IT systems up to
speed. It’s an imperfect solution that only works as long as I don’t
misbehave, and while we do a lot of internal reviewing, the truth is I could
abuse those rights.

At least Der Spiegel fired the fraudster when they found out.

[0] [https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-
krone...](https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-kroner-
senere)

~~~
JPKab
Just want to say this:

The fact that European readers even believed half of the fabrications in this
story is telling of how ignorant they really are about the USA.

Just because you have seen movies which are the product of LA and NYC doesn't
mean you know anything about the USA. Let me be clear: people in NYC and LA
themselves know nothing of their country. This is blatantly obvious when you
watch ANY Hollywood creation set in rural America.

It is frustrating to deal with self righteous assumptions of my culture like
this based on movies and TV shows.

~~~
mips_avatar
I have had a bunch of experiences in Europe where I get told what’s wrong with
America. I like how America is so self critical and wants to improve itself.
But most of these Europeans have no idea what they’re talking about. I had a
Brit tell me how sickened he was that 40% of Americans were Christians that
literally only support Israel in order to create a holy land that will survive
the apocalypse. He was so convinced that when I returned home I asked my
religious friends what they thought. I can’t find a single person who believes
anything remotely close to that. And definitely not a part of the calculus for
supporting Israel.

------
zaroth
I’m fairly convinced it’s not remotely limited to Der Spiegel. If primary
sources aren’t cited in downloadable attachments, it’s just best to assume the
thing is a pure work of fiction.

I have absolutely zero respect for “journalism” at this time. It is, as far as
I’m concerned, an entirely dead art, all life sucked from it by the great
destroyer we call _the Internet_.

This network we created, and in particular most of the shiny things at L7, is
not healthy for even an above average psyche. It attenuates all feedback loops
that our bodies require to form empathy, while amplifying the worst parts of
us through appeals to fame, fortune, and notoriety.

I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The
sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the _construct_ that _he
didn’t even have a chance_ , the better.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I'm inclined to agree and the sad part is, journalism is an essential NGO
organ of civil society.

The 4th Estate is a very important thing for us all.

Watching Cable News these days is crazy because you can watch journalists,
spin, lie and misrepresent ... but at the very same time they are presenting
facts that do matter.

Go take a look at 'waybackmacine' and click some links from even 10 years go -
the news was not nearly as crazy and clickbaity.

I truly hope that things can settle down a bit maybe in the next political
cycle.

Finally - I should say that almost all MSM left and right completely
misrepresent middle America. The reality in Cleveland, rural Ohio, Utah,
Houston, Alabama ... it's just not anywhere to be found on the news unless
something terrible that happens where the press wants to use that piece of
information to construct a narrative.

Edit: I should add that there is a very real financial pressure right now for
journos - newspapapers are falling apart everywhere, this is a real thing.
Individual journos are not natural capitalists. We used to pay for the news we
don't now, and we still haven't figured out a model. This is a major factor.

~~~
333c
I'd be interested to hear how you describe the current situation in Cleveland.
I just finished my first semester at a school nearby but spent no time in
Cleveland aside from the airport, so even though I've been nearby, I really
haven't been exposed.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Cleveland is just an example.

I currently live in Canada and get the local news from Vermont. It's sublime
and cathartic: local girls basketball team highlights. Interviews with part-
time stat reps who also run the local store. No clickbait language between
state reps, governor etc.. No culture war.

The national news is a circus, with each clown playing a part. It's
ideological, clickbait, narrative-driven and parsed to remove anything that
could upset corporate sponsors.

'Normal' is simply too boring for television.

~~~
tptacek
"Ideological" and "parsed to remove anything that could upset sponsors" are
incompatible goals.

------
lqet
The latest accusation against him is embezzlement [0]. Also, the Spiegel
reporter who tried to unmask Relotius was threatened with a termination of his
contract when he talked to supervisors about his findings. [1].

Also in the FAZ, there was a very good commentary on the whole case by one of
the publishers [2]. He identifies the same narrative smoke-bombs ("story-
telling kitsch") in the Spiegel's writeup of the whole case as in Relotius'
original articles.

[0] [https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/betrug-beim-
sp...](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/betrug-beim-spiegel-
claas-relotius-veruntreute-offenbar-auch-spendengelder-15955791.html)

[1] [https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/fall-
relotius-...](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/fall-relotius-
spiegel-reporter-mit-rauswurf-gedroht-15954983.html)

[2] [https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueber-die-
fa...](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueber-die-faelschungen-
von-claas-relotius-im-spiegel-15954144.html)

~~~
quonn
I came across [2] as well, yesterday, and particularly liked the conclusion:

Slightly improved Google translation:

„One does not write about arguments, ideas and concerns, but about the people
who supposedly have them and about how they are, how they look and how they
live, where one has met them, how dangerous, or at least exotic it was to meet
them at all, and that the wind lashed against the quay wall, when splendor and
misery came together at night in the room no. such-and-such. But as long as
one writes in such a way, because one thinks in such a way, the case of
Relotius will only lead to appeals to conscience and to the condemnation of
those without conscience. The underlying issue, the storytelling kitsch, will
not change.“

~~~
Fnoord
Could've been written about the con in general. I recently read a book about
this called The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria
Konnikova [1]. I can highly recommend it.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387895-the-
confidence-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387895-the-confidence-
game)

------
monksy
Besides the obivious lack of oversight on Der Spiegel and ethics of the
journalist. I believe that there are a few lessons we can take away here:

1\. We value honest hard work. However, we rarely value the people who do it.
(The journalist was a "star" journalist and was required to perform at that
level constantly.. does this ring a bell to any developers?) 2\. Confirmation
Bias is rather nasty, and that has been used to propagate some bad narritives.
Right now the political deviviness has encouraged by the media. This article:
Look at these "racist", "sexist", *ist people in some low-class people in this
rural area. At least this is what I get from it. (That's been the garbage
tauted by the left) 3\. This guy was trusted as a leader way too much. I would
not be surprised if he's a psychopath. (He has no concerns over the people he
screws over, and the only reason he seems sorry is that he got caught).

~~~
PavlovsCat
As this guy [0] (a TV moderator who handed Relotius several of his awards)
says, that journalist was under no economic pressure, at all. And the
interviewed person also calls out this worldview in which everybody is a
victim, nobody is an actor, and many journalists are more concerned about them
being victims than being victimizers.

And it really is telling that the perpetrator so easily gets styled as kind-
of-also-a-victim, as if having won a few prizes created this
pressure/temptation no human could possibly withstand.

(I started to write my comment in response to someone who replied to you and
said you using the word sociopath was "dehumanizing", and that they don't want
to defend the journalist, but that "any normal and well adjusted person" could
have gotten addicted to having won prizes -- that as well as some comments on
the first story about the subject on HN is what I meant with styling them as
victim, not your comment as such)

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TrfRWnYCo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TrfRWnYCo0)

------
pram
Maybe they were too willing to believe his depiction of small town America as
a bunch of poorly educated, bigoted hicks? Perhaps because it confirmed their
own biases?

I know it’s a German publication, but this is perhaps a symptom of the
monoculture that permeates a lot of organizations in the “West”

~~~
manfredo
When I read news articles about topics with which I am familiar, I encounter
plenty of statements that strike me as basically false. Consider this excerpt
from the New York Times' piece of Donald Knuth [1]:

> Following Dr. Knuth’s doctrine helps to ward off moronry. He is known for
> introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance
> of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion
> that nowadays seems almost twee.

Calling the idea that code should be readable by humans "almost twee" just
makes me think that the writer has no idea what they're talking about. Sure,
there are times when people write crap code, but being readable by humans _is
the whole reason why we built coding languages_. Not to mention, the average
readability of code has probably increased over time, not decreased. The
author is basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish
Knuth's reputation, to the detriment of the credibility of the rest of the
article.

It's nowhere near the magnitude of the fabrications in Der Spiegel of course,
but it does seem to be the case that writers are willing to trust their own
prejudices without fact checking. I was able to spot when those prejudices in
the above example but only because I have relevant domain knowledge. It makes
me wonder, how many times do I swallow the BS without knowing it? It's just a
matter of how small (or big) of a statement they're willing to make without
verifying it's veracity.

1\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-
comp...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-
algorithms-programming.html)

~~~
munificent
Gell-Mann amnesia effect: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-
Mann_amnesia_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

~~~
fromthestart
I immediately thought the same thing. But then I thought, not being a subject
matter expert doesn't give you an excuse to write bullshit.

I think people who study the arts are less likely to have experience with and
understand complex systems and, because of the different structure of knowlege
in a subject like journalism, it's easier to be overconfident in one's
knowlege. Especially when extended to topics like physics which require
mathematics to truly understand.

~~~
danso
And yet a journalist with no tech startup, venture capital, or biomedical
experience was able to understand and expose Theranos, which ran its scam
right out from Palo Alto and Stanford.

~~~
Fnoord
After reading Bad Blood, the exposure had almost failed was it not for
Carreyrou's enduring persistence. He met both internal and external pressure
to call off his investigation. Not every journalist is cut for that kind of
pressure.

------
ascar
Kinda offtopic: I find it interesting and a little bit disturbing to read "Der
Spiegel". "Der" is the German male form of "the" and the Spiegel uses it in
the title like "The New York Times".

For me as a German the comments here read like: A "The New York Times" article
stated... which is odd, everyone usually drops the "the", if it doesn't fit.

~~~
yhoneycomb
Hmm interesting. So it would make more sense to you to read "The Spiegel's
article..."?

~~~
ascar
Yes.

We also change the "der" in German newspapers. E.g. "at the Spiegel" "bei dem
Spiegel" or "in an article of the Spiegel" "in einem Bericht des Spiegels".

------
oldgradstudent
A few years ago the Columbia Journalism Review published an article about how
great Der Spiegel's fact checkers were.

[https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_l...](https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_largest_fact.php)

It's quite obvious that article about that small town had not passed through
the most cursory fact checking.

The CJR owes some explanation.

~~~
smadge
My impression from that interview is that the fact checkers are not doing
things like calling movies theaters, mayors, or owners of restaurants and
verifying the statements they allegedly made in their interviews with the
reporter are true. Instead they are cross referencing claims made by their
reporters, things like whether or not a politician has been quoted in a
reputable newspaper as saying something, or how many jobs were created in a
time period, with their database of open source intelligence. Is it expected
that a fact checker contact everyone a journalist interviewed and go over each
sentence and claim line by line and verify that it is true?

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Is it expected that a fact checker contact everyone a journalist interviewed
> and go over each sentence and claim line by line and verify that it is true?

Yes, this is exactly what fact checkers at top newspapers were traditionally
paid to do.

I have no idea how many true fact checkers are left, but you described the job
precisely.

------
DanielBMarkham
As somebody who does a lot of writing and used to write news copy, this is a
story I've been following for a while. In my mind it's easily the biggest
story in journalism this year.

The internet has made everybody a publisher, from your cousin who thinks Elvis
isn't dead to that MIT scientist with 17 degrees. And they're all online.

It's also created an instant feedback loop, where you instantly measure how
"good" your publishing is by tracking clicks, page time metrics, and
referrals.

It even provides a zero-overhead revenue model. The money's not what
publishing used to be, but hey, you can tap into it without having to do much.

Finally, because of the previous items, it has destroyed traditional
journalism. What do I see when I consume journalism today? I see fear.
Everybody knows it's dead and internet eyeballs is the only thing that does
anything. The person and their emotional connection over Twitter, FB, YouTube
and the like is the brand, not the paper or magazine. Everybody knows that.

This means the old guard is gone, the people who used to sit in an office and
tell you that your story was crap. They cost too much in overhead and nobody
cares if your story was crap as long as you correct it the next day. (It's all
self-correcting, right?)

So instead of news, we now have celebrities who give their personal
impressions of how it all makes them feel. People reward or punish publishers
by their ability to draw them into some event and make them feel one way or
the other. This reporter (I use the term loosely) knew how to do a great job
of that. He also knew that the emotional content far outweighed the rest of
it. People loved him. His publisher loved him.

Until they didn't.

The only reason he was fired, the only reason BigNetCorp X would care if
they're screwing you over or not, is because enough _other people_ were able
to raise a big enough rukus that it couldn't be ignored. He could have kept
doing this for years as long as he was willing to scale his fabrications in
accordance to how much of a PR stink people could have made.

While interesting as a stand-alone story, my feeling is that each of these
just makes the next bunch more clever.

It's not a very good time to be alive for people who like journalism.

------
CPLX
The irony is that nearly every prestigious American publication has run dozens
of versions of this story, and while most of those should be presumed to be
factually accurate, they are fundamentally the same work of fiction.

~~~
beginningguava
It's not difficult to push your agenda with it technically being "true". Just
interview 100 people, focus on 1 or two, maybe take their quotes out of
context, and congratulations you can portray an entire town or demographic in
a negative light that fits with your readers preconceived notions

~~~
sonnyblarney
In 2018 you don't need to interview anyone.

You just cruise Twitter to find some random poor soul who said something
consistent with the narrative you want to construct.

Now you say: "People are saying XYZ"

And deflect the source of the narrative from yourself.

------
friedman23
I remember an interesting discussion I read either here or on reddit between
an American and a German where the German stated that he believed he had an
accurate idea of what life was like in the US. I didn't have an opinion on who
was right or wrong in that discussion at the time but if the lies stated in
this article about this town did not immediately send off the bullshit
detector for most Germans I'm afraid they've been fed a significant amount of
misinformation and propaganda and really have no idea how we live here.

~~~
ciguy
I have lived in Europe for about 5 years now, and sadly this is correct.
German and French media in particular seem to delight in disparaging America
and Americans.

Most Germans I've talked to are incredibly misinformed about what life in
America is actually like. They think the entire country is more like a small
southern town and that police roam the streets shooting citizens at random.

We have our problems of course and are far from perfect but the extent of them
is grossly exaggerated by European media.

~~~
aetherson
I spent a month in Germany in the mid-90's as a high school student. At the
time, Bay Watch was big thing, and the (friendly, nice) people I met had a
pretty tough time wrapping their heads around the idea that my experience,
living in California, did not include warm beaches, that I didn't surf, etc.

It's really easy to pick up caricatures of life in foreign countries. I don't
think anyone is immune to imaging that foreigners are more exotic and strange
than they really are. I remember someone on an American forum confidently
saying that in anime, a character's family owning a car was supposed to
indicate great wealth because car ownership was super rare in Japan -- a vast
exaggeration of a minor demographic difference.

~~~
veddox
> It's really easy to pick up caricatures of life in foreign countries.

I'm a German who's lived abroad for the majority of his life. This statement
is so true. I've heard of Africans asking if Hitler was still in power,
Americans thinking Germans all lived in castles, and Germans wondering whether
we had electricity in Zambia. If you've never lived there, how _can_ you know?

I have dozens of American friends and frequently read American publications. I
daresay I have some understanding of US culture from this exposure - but even
so I still don't know what it's like to actually live in the United States.

------
shshhdhs
Wow, Der Spiegal’s lack of fact checking is sad, and it seems like pure
fraudulent writing. I love the breakdown of counter-investigative journalism
here.

~~~
yostrovs
The have nearly 100 people in their fact check department. Legendary German
efficiency.

------
forapurpose
The original article, with the same title, researched and written by two
residents of the town, is here:

[https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-
journalist-m...](https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-
messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7)

I think that's a better link than the one above, which is to a partisan
political website.

~~~
tom4000
Plus it is not behind a pay wall.

------
pavel_lishin
I wonder if this guy is just a compulsive liar who happened to fake his way
into a journalism career; I wonder if we'll hear stories from his
acquaintances about this.

~~~
starbeast
>I wonder if this guy is just a compulsive liar who happened to fake his way
into a journalism career

That accurately describes one of the established ways to bookend a stint in
politics. In the UK, this caliber of bullshit would either tip them for a
future cabinet post should they ever stand for election, or indicate that they
are a recently retired MP, fabricating scandal to preserve some remaining
public relevance, which they know only how to measure in inches of print.

------
Tycho
To be honest, my impression of modern journalism at established news
organizations is:

    
    
      * business model crashing, so experienced staff laid off
    
      * smart millennials don't opt for a career in journalism
    
      * the ones who do emerge inculcated by the college monoculture, largely unable to question authority
    
      * growing up with net-access, they are ill-equipped for any method of fact-finding except google searches
    
      * laziness, incompetence and docile conformity make them soft targets for vested interests
    
      * many stories are therefore just regurgitated press releases
    
      * many 'reactions' are strikingly uniform across independent organizations
    

On the bright side, the internet allows real information to route around the
established press, greatly reducing their ability to shape public opinion or
suppress stories that don't fit someone's agenda. We could be entering a
golden age of independent journalists whose careers live and die by their
reputation for integrity. But even if we are not, _wikileaks_ style journalism
-- the transmission of source documents -- should see us through.

------
itronitron
Some of you might be interested in a good example of an article about a small
town done right... >>
[http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-
wash...](http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-washingtons-
atomic-legacy.html)

~~~
Wildgoose
Thanks - that is a very good and BALANCED article.

------
dmoy
Ha, Fergus Falls. Driven through there many a time. Don't know if I've ever
stopped... too close to Fargo/Moorhead on the drive up/back.

This whole article reads like that guy from the fifth season of The Wire.

~~~
protomyth
I've taken to stopping at the Fergus Falls Walmart on my way through. I guess
I got a bit old and need that stop after Fargo for gas and food. Its basically
half-way between Fargo and Alexandria which means its going to have lower
traffic because both of them are bigger. Plus, along that route Fargo & St.
Cloud have cheaper gas prices. It is a good stop point if you are having car
trouble or the weather gets a bit too much to handle.

1) Fargo, ND often has the cheapest gas in the area because it has 3 pipelines
going through the town.

~~~
dmoy
Yea fair enough. Alexandria always made a better halfway point for me, halfway
ish between TC and F/MH.

~~~
protomyth
When I was younger, I was with you since Alexandria also had a better gas
station and coffee shop. I've had to adjust as I got older.

------
misil
My favorite tidbit of this story:

In 2014, Relotius sold two stories to the monthly magazine of a Swiss paper,
both interviews with hairdressers. The second one (still online:
[https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-
haar...](https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar-
dunkel)), a supposed interview with a Finnish hairdresser immediately received
a comment from someone in Finland ("this report seems to be fiction"),
complaining that the mentioned salon doesn't actually exist, the mentioned
prices were all wrong and the mentioned name had the wrong gender. The
magazine printed a correction and decided to no longer work with the author.

No offense to Finnish hairdressers, but if someone completely fabricates a
story this meaningless, it's reasonable to assume that he's a pathological
liar and not a single written word of his can be taken seriously.

Given that the guy was such a pathological liar, even about trivial matters, I
find it very hard to believe that no one supposedly ever had any suspicion
about the truthfulness of writing.

------
justkd
David Kriesel (the guy who detected the Xerox issue 3 years ago) has been data
mining Spiegel Online (the online version of Der Spiegel) for a couple of
years now. It will be interesting to see what other articles are full of
fiction:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpwsdRKt8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpwsdRKt8Q)

Maybe David is willing to hand out the data he has downloaded?

------
philshem
Here’s a great twitter thread from a German-based American fact checker.
[https://twitter.com/spoke32/status/1076219412485677056](https://twitter.com/spoke32/status/1076219412485677056)

>> As far as I can tell from their mea culpa, this vetting process is limited
to what can be Googled from Hamburg.

~~~
sweden
Oh dear, one of those Tweets that should have been some sort of proper blog
post.

The damn thing doesn't even load properly with cookies disabled.

I apologize for the toxicity but the content got lost to me.

------
luord
If it weren't because the article came out in 2017, I'd have thought that this
Relotius fellow played too much "Far Cry V" and thought it was a documentary.

Also, TIL that many germans haven't watched "Game of Thrones", apparently.

