The youthful fabulists: Stephen Glass vs. Claas Relotius
Perhaps you’ve heard of German journalist Claas Relotius. He wrote for the German periodical Der Spiegel and and had won “numerous awards such as CNN’s Journalist of the Year and Germany’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.” I guess you’d say he qualified for the adjective “renowned.”
Well, now he’s renowned for another reason—he’s been revealed as a fabulist on the order of Stephen Glass, who wrote fake stories for The New Republic and was finally exposed and disgraced, but not until after he’d been hailed as a journalistic wunderkind. That was about twenty years ago, and although there are similarities in their stories and methods, there are differences that reflect how far journalism has fallen in those intervening twenty years.
For example, although Glass made up many articles out of the whole cloth, he was aware of TNR’s fairly rigorous fact-checking of the time and created an elaborate back-story for each article to fool the fact-checkers:
[Glass] got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn’t, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.
It all worked because of his skill at creating incredibly complex scenes and also because of that accommodating personality [of Glass’s].
That’s a tremendous amount of effort expended by Glass. But Relotius didn’t have to work that hard to fool his magazine. Fact-checking of the type that had existed at TNR back in the 90s, when Glass was operating, could be thwarted for a significant amount of time—as Glass’s successful capers proved—but it was difficult to do. For Relotius, however, evading the “world’s largest fact-checking organization” run by Der Spiegel was a relative piece of cake.
How could that be? Well, largest doesn’t equal best. As the WSJ points out:
In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Anderson [one of the authors of a piece that exposed Relotius] wrote in an email that none of the people she spoke with in Fergus Falls referenced in the Der Spiegel article were approached for fact-checking by the magazine.
In an article Wednesday, Der Spiegel wrote that Mr. Relotius “distorts reality” in the article about Fergus Falls. A spokesman for the magazine said that Der Spiegel’s fact-checking process “does not include contacting any subjects of articles,” adding that the department reviews each story sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility, followed by a review between the department and the story’s author.
So what appears to matter these days to Spiegel is whether the story is credible (remember that word?) rather than whether it’s true. Another thing that sometimes matters is whether the story suits the editors’ political purposes (anti-Trump, for example). “Too good to fact-check” seems to have really been a practice at Der Spiegel.
Relotius is 33 years old and has been writing for Der Spiegel since 2011, when he was around 26. That’s very young, and is similar to Glass who was even younger (23 when he started writing for TNR and 26 when he was fired).
I don’t think their youth is a coincidence, either (and you can add Jayson Blair, a rising star for the NY Times who was fired for the same offenses at the ripe old age of 27, having started there at the age of 23). Years ago, writers of those ages would have been relegated to learning their craft by covering town council meetings and building dedications. But now they are pushed into the limelight, bask in it, and are willing to lie to get more of it.
[NOTE: Relotius also may have set up a charity scam.]
Instapundit has a tweet from our German ambassador, Richard Grenell, which shows the previous bias of Der Spiegel. They believed what they wanted to believe. Does anyone remember David’s Medienkritik blog? The German MSM will kiss Obama’s a**, but dump on any Republicans or deplorables.
The Germans are our misfortune.
Riffing on a theme …
How can you put Jayson Blair in the same class as Relotius and Glass? Those two were hardworking and imaginative, and won prizes for their work. Their work was interesting. Blair, on the other hand, was a lazy addict who didn’t get out much; he hoped his writing would be sufficiently boring that no one would notice that it was either stolen or made up.
LTEC:
Nowhere was I evaluating them as writers in terms of the quality of their writing. I’m comparing them only as fairly well-known young journalists whose articles were based on falsehoods.
By the way, see this for some information about Glass’s writing style. Apparently his articles were very heavily edited to make them readable.
For example, although Glass made up many articles out of the whole cloth, he was aware of TNR’s fairly rigorous fact-checking of the time and created an elaborate back-story for each article to fool the fact-checkers:
Disagree. Fact checkers were a novelty at The New Republic at that time. IIRC, Michael Kelly hired the first crew during his seven month tenure as editor. Glass was hired toward the end of Andrew Sullivan’s tenure as editor, worked through Kelly’s tenure, and then was exposed and fired mid-way through Charles Lane’s tour as editor. A critic of the magazine writing in Policy Review offered that Glass’ fabrications were often quite gaudy and should have triggered some skepticism right off the bat; his conclusion was that Glass understood just what his editors and readers biases were. The New Republic did receive letters of complaint from some subjects of these articles, to which they replied with the standard-issue display of arrogance (“We stand behind our reporting…”).
I cancelled my own subscription to TNR in 1993, midway through Sullivan’s time as editor. There were a couple of reasons I had to do so, but the main one was that Sullivan was approving for publication stories which were frankly incredible and could only get past an editor who fancied the behavioral patters of the gay male subculture ca. 1990 were normal. I doubt some of those pieces could ever have survived serious fact-checking.
Instapundit has a tweet from our German ambassador, Richard Grenell, which shows the previous bias of Der Spiegel.
Bully for Grennell.
Personally, I’m sick and tired of the Eurotrash chatterati. (I don’t care for our own, either). I refuse to believe aught but an odd minority of those dicks ever do anything in their professional lives which is not self-aggrandizing in some way.
Art Deco:
“Fairly rigorous” is not the same as “rigorous.” Nor does it mean it had been in place a long time. But it was more rigorous than what seems to have been the policy at Der Spiegel lately.
Let us not forget what wiki modestly calls the “Scott Thomas Beauchamp controversy.”
The Scott Thomas Beauchamp controversy concerns the publication of a series of diaries by Scott Thomas Beauchamp (b. 1983 St. Louis, Missouri) – a private in the United States Army, serving in the Iraq War, and a member of Alpha Company, 1-18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.
In 2007, using the pen name “Scott Thomas”, Beauchamp filed three entries in The New Republic (TNR) about serving at forward operating base Falcon, Baghdad. These entries concerned alleged misconduct by soldiers, including Beauchamp, in post-invasion Iraq.
Several publications and bloggers questioned Beauchamp’s statements. A U.S. Army investigation had concluded the statements in the material were false. The New Republic investigated the statements, first standing by the content of Beauchamp’s articles for several months, then concluding that they could no longer stand by this material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Thomas_Beauchamp_controversy
The cherry on top is that Scott Thomas Beauchamp was married to a TNR fact-checker!
His editor was Franklin Foer, who defended Beauchamp to near the bitter end. Foer still pops up in the news and retains his reputation as a responsible journalist. Which means less and less these days.
This is such a great sentence, it’s so illogical, yet it’s their procedure and they even tell someone else how they fact check (or “fact check”) articles as though this is acceptable –
A spokesman for the magazine said that Der Spiegel’s fact-checking process “does not include contacting any subjects of articles,” adding that the department reviews each story sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility
“…sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility.”
(One has to love that “sentence by sentence” part! Yep, they sure tore that thing apart looking for holes…)
So there was no doubt—absolutely no doubt—that the articles in question were “accurate” and “plausible”.
Except they just happened to be chock full o’ lies.
(Oh well, bad luck. Could happen to anybody, really…)
But maybe—just maybe—insofar as these “accurate and plausible” lies reflected sophisticated(!) European preconceptions about the barbaric Uncivilized States of America, they must have been—they could only have been—true lies. Or whatever.
“Fake but Accurate”(TM), the Yurpeon Version.
His editor was Franklin Foer, who defended Beauchamp to near the bitter end.
Foer, as you say, is still around and writing fiction, about Trump this time instead of Bush,.
Claas was credible to his editors because he confirmed what they so wanted to believe. And yes, I drew the parallel between him, Scott Beauchamp and Jayson Blair. They also wrote what their editors were panting to believe.
No matter how fabulous, or fraudulent.
(My daughter, the Marine laughed and laughed when she read the Beauchamp account of him running over dogs in a Bradley. Yeah, she said – maybe if the dogs are dead or deaf. Bradleys make a humongous amount of noise, and the driver really can’t see all that much from the cockpit. And – running over extraneous trash at the edge of the roadway? Not advised. Booby traps, you know,)
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58640.html
expat
Does anyone remember David’s Medienkritik blog?
Beat me to it. While David’s Medienkritik has been inactive for years, it recently published on the Relotius brouhaha.SPIEGEL Reporter Fired for Inventing Stories – Some with Anti-American Tilt.
Like David’s Medienkritik said, “Some things never change.” German media calumnies against the Amis are old hat. David’s Medienkritik had a brilliant take-down of another German journalist’s ignorant, inaccurate, deceitful characterization of the Amis in 2007. Markus Günther: Hypocritical Americans Suppressing Memories of Slavery – Other Injustices.
The article goes on to refute the lying, deceitful German. Such as pointing out the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC.
Having had cordial relations with Germans in the US and in Latin America- as housemates, co-workers and fellow tourists ( and a brother-in-law who emigrated from Germany)- I was rather shocked at the anti-American sentiments in Germany that David’s Medienkritik exposed.
Even if Der Spiegel doesn’t contact sources, it should have been easy to use Google Earth and Streetview to validate some of the more tangible claims in the article like the town’s welcome sign and the “thick forest” that surrounds the town. They also should be able to push the author for photographic evidence of the “Mexicans go home” sign.
JaimeRoberto on December 24, 2018 at 7:39 pm at 7:39 pm said:
Even if Der Spiegel doesn’t contact sources, it should have been easy to use Google Earth and Streetview to validate some of the more tangible claims in the article like the town’s welcome sign and the “thick forest” that surrounds the town. They also should be able to push the author for photographic evidence of the “Mexicans go home” sign.
* * *
Reminds me of so many commenters on news articles who expose the lies by doing just a few minutes of research, which the authors and editors couldn’t be bothered to do.
“Too good to check” ought to replace the media’s slogans, such as “democracy dies in darkness” (“and we don’t plan to turn on the lights”), “all the news that’s fit to print” (“and we print it to fit our narrative”), and the like.
Reminds me of so many commenters on news articles who expose the lies by doing just a few minutes of research, which the authors and editors couldn’t be bothered to do.
The Dan Rather Texas ANG story about Bush was the end of any credibility by the media. It had been exposed as a fraud before Rather was off the air.
Fabulism — can’t we just say “fake news” ?
(from the Vanity Fair article on Glass)
“He was hardly the first to make up stories. Janet Cooke had done it in 1980 in a Pulitzer Prize–winning piece for The Washington Post. Nik Cohn, 21 years after the fact, blithely admitted to having made up most of the New York story that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. More recently, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for making up parts of her columns. ”
I wonder how much of our accepted history will be revealed (21 years or so after the fact) as fraudulent.
One of Trump’s great guerrilla media triumphs was reclaiming “Fake news” as a conservative epithet against liberal journalism.
… and we can’t forget Jackie and the Rolling Stone.
Gringo on December 24, 2018 at 7:14 pm at 7:14 pm said:
expat
Does anyone remember David’s Medienkritik blog?
* * *
A new blog to me, and quite interesting.
His last article to date links to this one, of general relevance:
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15894&fbclid=IwAR2oivLxUEXQl_gTvkFM-__qS_y8lJ-IqDvWiWqvp9JeERchoW7H2gIeRVE
“The amusing bit is the German media is rushing around looking puzzled, as to how the vaunted fact checking system could have failed. After all, the best people are in control of the media. How could the best people have made such basic errors? As is the case in America, whenever these things happen, the media hand-wringing is just a dodge. What really concerns them is how easy it was for two bumpkins from dirt country to sluice out the facts from the fiction in this particular article.
That’s always the thing with these scandals. The media big shots always come off as if they have been insulted about their shenanigans being revealed. In this case, the other major media outfits are rallying to defend Der Spiegel. In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the main stream media, the opposite is always true. They circle the wagons and begin lecturing the hoi polloi about the dangers of questioning the media.
That is the real cause of these scandals. For a long time, the mass media in the West has been a mono-culture. You can’t have a career in the media if you don’t hold all the right opinions. To call the media an echo chamber for the left is to understate the problem.
…
His story about slack-jawed yokels in the American heartland ticked all the boxes popular with the left-wing cultural outlook. He was not sent there to report on the place. He was sent there to confirm what his employers already knew about Middle American and Trump voters.
This is why Western media is something worse than propaganda. The person hired by the state or hired by the corporate marketing department has self-awareness. They know their job is to polish the apple of their superiors.
…
The media is a different thing. They really believe their own nonsense. They think they are part of a special class of human, a priestly class that not only reports facts to the public, but provides moral instruction. The mass media is so intoxicated by their own self-righteousness, they lack the ability to question their own actions. When Claas Relotius came back from the bush, reporting exactly what his bosses knew was the case, they had no reason to question it. It was too good to check.”
Sgt. Mom on December 24, 2018 at 7:13 pm at 7:13 pm said:
Claas was credible to his editors because he confirmed what they so wanted to believe.
* * *
Good post linked by Sgt Mom, and this part I especially liked:
“Frankly, this kind of journalistic malpractice is why so many of us now regard the national media outlets with extreme skepticism: … So after ten or twenty years or this – or even more, since it was much more difficult before the internet and widely-disseminated blogs, websites and discussion boards, to even unearth the like of such examples that I have listed – the news media’s credibility is comprehensively shot, and by the conduct of their own operatives.”
The similarites of Glass to Frank Abegnale of “Catch Me If You Can” are striking.
I haven’t seen enough of Relotius’s biography to judge, but he has been accused of embezzling money he solicited for Syrian orphans, which puts them all in pretty much the same ball park.
https://nypost.com/2018/12/23/disgraced-german-journalist-now-suspected-of-charity-scam/
Frank Abagnale; no edit today.
His book is more illuminating than the movie, I think, but enjoyed both of them.
Bewailing the depths to which journalism has fallen presupposes that journalism still exists. It does not, the MSM has effectively pruned nearly all objectivity from itself. Unless of course objective facts and rationales serve the narrative.
The MSM are propagandists and the only sin among propagandists is getting caught. Which, as far as Der Spiegel, CNN and the rest are concerned is Relotius’ only sin.
The Dan Rather Texas ANG story about Bush was the end of any credibility by the media. It had been exposed as a fraud before Rather was off the air.
No, it was the end of Mapes and Rather. Other outlets were quite willing to report CBS embarrassment. CBS let Rather and Mapes down slowly but eventually canned them. What hit you at the time is that just ten years earlier the two of them could have brazened it out and emerged uninjured. Within days, Mapes’ scamming around was exposed. Rather in a fit of gross arrogance doubled-down. The two of them have never stopped lying, and they snookered Robert Redford (though that was likely pushing on an open door). I doubt a retrospective audit of the work of either would show it was their first instance of journalistic fabrication.
So, while we’re on the topic of award winning fabulists, I guess I’ll be the first to mention Walter Duranty.
“Too good to check” ought to replace the media’s slogans
Hasn’t “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” been their de facto MO all along anyway? It was a long time ago I heard the saying “Everything you read in the newspapers is true except for those things you have personal knowledge of”.
FOAF – you essentially summarized the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
Michael Crichton’s restatement comes up first in most searches, but Murray Gell-Mann identified the syndrome in his autobiograpy IIRC.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
? Michael Crichton
We saw this happen on “60 Minutes” a long time ago, when they did an expose of a story that we had first-hand knowledge of, and got almost every major fact wrong (the farmer and the controversy existed, but that was about it).
Never watched the show again, so I wouldn’t be tempted to believe them.
“I wonder…”
I keep thinking that those myriads of unfortunate people living (imprisoned?) behind the Iron Curtain had a tremendous advantage over us Westerners in that they knew they could not believe anything they read (and heard and saw) and thus had to become adept at reading between the lines.
It’s a lesson that no doubt some Westerners have learned; but I would imagine that most do believe, for the most part, what they read and see and hear….
Unfortunately, since a sense of trust is what catapults a society forward, this sense of diminishing trust will necessarily have a deleterious and sinister result on Western societies….further exacerbated by the increasing need for fervent political correctness and the concomitant self-censorship which it too often effects.
It has been pointed out, ad nauseum, that ironically, the West has in too many cases been adopting precisely those mores which have prevented many of the countries from which migrants have been fleeing from developing.
(Maybe a little boy or girl in the thronging crowd should ask, “Why?”)
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
My guess would be that reporters who had a regular beat and were schooled in that beat could produce satisfactory stories. The foreign correspondents were ever the least reliable even if they were posted from where they reported because of a deficit of language skills. And, of course, some of them have been political sectaries (e.g. Raymond Bonner and Chris Hedges) or partisans of one side in a discrete conflict (Donald Neff).
We saw this happen on “60 Minutes” a long time ago, when they did an expose of a story that we had first-hand knowledge of, and got almost every major fact wrong
60 Minutes is worse than incompetent. Years ago, they asked permission of a famous chief of surgery at a New York medical school to study how surgeons are trained. He gave them complete cooperation but the story, when it ran, was about “Ghost Surgeons,” which alleged that patients were being operated on by residents in training when they had been told it was the professor doing the surgery.
In fact, all surgery in teaching hospitals is done by teams, including residents in training but the professor has the final word on who is qualified to do the hard parts. The “Patient” who was their informant was a hospital employee who was undoubtedly lying.
The Rathergate memos were never found absolutely, positively to be forgeries. This is the thin limb many liberals cling to, not just Rather and Mapes.
However, given that no technical authority would vouch for the Killian memos, no one from Col Killian’s office or family had any knowledge of the memos, and no one from CBS or otherwise managed to recreate the proportionally-spaced memos with equipment available from 1972, plus Lt. Col. Burkett’s absurd story that he passed on “copies” but burned the originals, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion.
Likely no one wanted to reach that conclusion. Surely there are serious laws about forging military documents and using broadcast facilities to transmit fraud. Not to mention interfering in a national election.
And then there is F-ing the elephants like Ali Watkins. Still employed
@huxley “The Rathergate memos were never found absolutely, positively to be forgeries. This is the thin limb many liberals cling to, not just Rather and Mapes.”
I believe they were proven forgeries – starting with the 5 digit zip code in the letterhead that didn’t exist at the time of the writing when postal codes contained only 2 digits. Then, as you point out, the proportional type didn’t exist and the supposed writer denied ever writing them.
Ray is back on the job, Expat:
https://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2018/12/davids-medienkritik-precisely-described-and-diagnosed-the-culture-that-created-relotius-in-2011.html
To Huxley – those of us who remember Rather’s collusion to influence the election are among the Trump supporters who are less than impressed by the discovery that Russia funded Facebook ads that kinda sorta maybe advanced Trump’s campaign (while also funding activities in Hillary’s favor as well).