SPIEGEL Reporter Fired for Inventing Stories - Some with Anti-American Tilt

Well - that paragon of high journalism and integrity - Der Spiegel - beacon of honest, objective, and above-all "expert" reporting on the United States apparently has a problem. One of its reporters has been fired for inventing facts - and actually getting caught doing so. According to BBC News:

"German news magazine Der Spiegel has sacked an award-winning staff writer after accusing him of inventing details and quotes in numerous stories.

Claas Relotius "falsified articles on a grand scale and even invented characters", Der Spiegel said.

Among the articles in question are major features that had been nominated for or won awards, the magazine added. (...)

An investigation into a story by Mr Relotius about immigration and the US-Mexican border revealed that he had fabricated information about seeing a hand-painted sign in a town in Minnesota that read: "Mexicans Keep Out."

Fraudulent information appeared in other stories including one about inmates at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay and another about the US NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick."

Now wouldn't that have been quite fitting for the Amis to have an Auslaender Raus equivalent? Nothing would be more satisfying to the leftist-German psyche than to bring the cowboys right down to German standards - mitigating some pent-up xenophobia-guilt.

And on another front, Marc Pitzke - Amerika-Experte extraordinaire - has joined the rest of the Angry Left media in making nice with and even lauding the McCain/Bush "good Republicans" who they once bashed to no end so long as they threatened to exercise any real power. Now that they stand at odds with Trump, however, they are newfound heroes and lovable old foils. 

Mr. Relotius is perhaps just the most overt of Spiegel liars, caught and sacked for being too brazen in his journalistic malpractice. But make no mistake: The lies of omission, spin and bias that have tainted Der Spiegel and Spiegel Online for decades continue unabated on an industrial scale. Some things never change...  

Comments

[televoid]

The Medium article that exposed this madness is very elucidating in expounding upon Der Spiegel's lies:

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7

[HelianUnbound]

As I noted in a comment at Chicago Boyz, Der Spiegel has just posted an article about how "shocked, shocked," they are that their “layers of editors and fact checkers” somehow failed to detect Relotius' fake news.

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/der-fall-claas-relotius-wie-das-spiegel-sicherungssystem-an-grenzen-stiess-a-1244593.html

For those who don't read German, here's the first paragraph:

“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 Medium article that blew this story wide open:

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7

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.

[gk]

What a load of crap. Its the same as our american media. Its all biased to lean left. They all go to the same schools, hang out at the same bars. They never leave their tribe to ever express a contrary opinion or they get excommunicated. Of course their work product is going to suffer. Does anyone think the germans will ever reexamine their cherished beliefs of American's? They have all the answers, just ask them!