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.]
https://www.thenewneo.com/2018/12/24/the-youthful-fabulists-stephen-glass-vs-claas-relotius/