Worse than Stern magazines Hitler Diaries fiasco. That was just a on-off event. Claas Relotius, on the other hand, managed to get a whole series of brazen fabrications past Spiegel's fact checking procedures over a period of several years. The report you linked to mentions that checks were made. For example, when Relotius wrote that it takes a good hour to drive from the city of Marianne to Tallahassee, the fact checkers questioned it and found the assertion to be true. Great. But then they somehow failed to notice that the reporter never ever actually met many of the people he wrote about at great length as if he had spent hours, days and even weeks with them.DRSB wrote: ↑Thu Dec 20, 2018 2:25 pmIs this not a bastard?This is what Spiegel explains: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellscha ... 44579.htmlGermany's Der Spiegel says star reporter Claas Relotius wrote fake stories 'on a grand scale'
Der Spiegel said Claas Relotius, one of its top journalists, had fabricated parts of more than a dozen stories.
Hong Kong (CNN Business)A top European news magazine has fired one of its star journalists after discovering that he had fabricated facts and sources in more than a dozen articles over a seven-year period.
"Claas Relotius, a reporter and editor, falsified his articles on a grand scale and even invented characters, deceiving both readers and his colleagues," Germany's Der Spiegel said in an article published online Wednesday.
The startling revelation is a heavy blow to Der Spiegel, a 71-year-old publication that's renowned for its quality journalism and read by hundreds of thousands of people in print and by millions online.
"I'm so angry, horrified, shocked, stunned," the magazine's deputy foreign editor Mathieu von Rohr tweeted. "Claas Relotius faked, he cheated all of us."
After a colleague working with Relotius on a story in the United States flagged suspicions about his reporting, Der Spiegel says it carried out an internal investigation. Relotius confessed last week that he invented entire passages for that article, and also falsified information in other stories, according to the magazine.
Relotius, who resigned Monday at the magazine's request, said he was sick and needed help, a Der Spiegel spokesman told CNN.
Why not? Well, it's cheap to check the distance between Marianne and Tallahassee. A quick google sorts that query out. Checking if Relotius had spent face to face time with the people he pretended to have talked with and accompanied at length costs money. Money Der Spiegel was not prepared to spend, for that would have a negative impact on its profitability. It therefore comes as no surprise that the scandal only blew up when a colleague of Relotius, Juan Moreno became afraid of potentially having his own reputation compromised after discovering what Relotius turned an article into that he co-authored with the fraudster, spent a considerable amount of his own money on retracing certain steps in order to prove Relotius wrong and himself in the clear.
All that said, the only redeeming features of this sorry tale are that 1) the resultant fake news were the result of greed than ideology, and 2) although you need to read between the lines about money pinching, Spiegel made a clean breast of its massive fact checking failure very much as soon as the star reporter's lies were uncovered.