Germany’s media landscape is still in shock after Der Spiegel , the country’s leading news magazine, revealed that one of its journalists, the 33-year-old Claas Relotius (in picture), falsified dozens of his reports.
Mr. Relotius, who was sacked earlier this month after the exposé, had been a star reporter of the magazine. He had won several awards for his work, including the European Press Prize and the German Reporter Prize. After the revelation of the fraud, he returned the awards. Mr. Relotius has reported from different parts of the world, including from countries such as Turkey, Iraq, Cuba, the U.S. and those in the Balkan region.
“Claas Relotius worked for Der Spiegel for four years and wrote many fantastic features. Unfortunately, most of them included passages that were made up. He wrote about people that he never met or simply invented them out of thin air. He described scenes that never happened,” the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief said in a statement. An example of his fake reporting is a story from Fergus Falls, a small town in Minnesota, which Mr. Relotius visited in March 2017. According to Der Spiegel , he spent 38 days in the town. His final piece about the town was a long read that portrayed the 14,000 inhabitants of Fergus Falls and their Mayor as a backward pro-Donald Trump crowd that hates Mexican migrants.
However, almost everything about the story was false, as two bloggers from Fergus Falls pointed out. “What happened is beyond what I could have ever imagined: An article titled ‘Where they pray for Trump on Sundays’, and endless pages of an insulting, if not hilarious, excuse for journalism,” Michelle Anderson from Fergus Falls pointed out in a piece that she co-wrote with Jake Krohn on medium.com. The article contains a list of “top 11 most absurd lies” that Mr. Relotius produced in the report. Mr. Krohn and Ms. Anderson decided to publish their piece on the same day as Mr. Relotius’s fraud was exposed by Der Spiegel .
Flaws in reports
The fraud was exposed by one of his colleagues who worked with him on a story from the U.S. on the refugee trail coming from South America. Juan Moreno, a freelance journalist who writes for Der Spiegel , noticed many flaws and errors when he read the work of Mr. Relotius.
Mr. Moreno later said it was not easy to convince his bosses about Mr. Relotius’s problematic work. Probably, some believed that he was envious of the “superstar” Mr. Relotuis, as he pointed out in a recent interview with Der Spiegel . After initially denying the allegations, Mr. Relotius later confessed to cooking up entire passages in several instances. The magazine says the reporter’s actions were committed “intentionally” and “methodically”.
The magazine itself is facing a huge backlash since the fraud has been exposed. One of the main reasons for that is the fact that Der Spiegel is also trying to make a story out of the fraud case. A recent issue of the magazine mainly focussed on the “case Relotius”. According to the magazine’s editors, they wanted to share all details with their readers.
Nevertheless, many people still wonder how the fraud could take place on such a large scale. Especially, the fact-checkers of Der Spiegel , who are known to be very strict, face a lot of criticism. Often, it appears that they did not check Mr. Relotius’s work. “To claim that no publication is safe from a dishonest journalist may be true. But it’s also clear that they [ Der Spiegel ] didn’t try very hard,” said American journalist Andrew Curry in a long Twitter thread about fact-checking and journalism.
Emran Feroz is a journalist based in Stuttgart, Germany.
