Fake News is A Problem. And Some Journalists Are Making it Worse.

NOTE: I do not confess to being a good journalist; that’s why I got out of the business more than a decade ago. I screwed things up and made mistakes, but I never flat out made things up.

We know “fake news” is a problem. But when journalists make their own fake news, the problem becomes a thousand times worse.

Example: Not long after the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, German news magazine Der Spiegel sent award-winning journalist Claas Relotius to find a typical small American town and paint a picture for Germans of the America that sent Trump to the White House.

Unfortunately for real journalists everywhere, what Relotius wrote for the magazine was a lie.
It turns out it is one of at least 14 stories the journalist wrote for Der Spiegel that Relotius admits he made up entirely.

Even two residents of Fergus Falls, who might want to paint Trump supporters as less-than-savory, were appalled at what was written, and fact-checked the article themselves.

Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, writing for Medium, agree there may be political tension, racism, and unsavory characters in their small town, what Der Spiegel published was at best a caricature of their friends and neighbors and at worse, a pile of German horseshit.

They write:

Yes, we have problems with racism here that he could have used real accounts of (the sign he mentions, “Mexicans Keep Out,” as far as we’ve asked other members of the community, was not seen by anyone else, and would have certainly generated a significant community discussion), but I would also have made sure he got the story of Fergus Falls residents who proudly attended the women’s marches in St. Paul or D.C., and displayed Black Lives Matters signs in our yards or buttons on our jackets, people who mentor immigrants and refugees in the region, people who grow their own food and bike everywhere in order to protect the environment and keep their families healthy, people who have chosen the simplicity rural life as a protest against the often extravagant necessities of city living.

This is just a hunch, but it seems to me that Relotius’ overseas readers might appreciate knowing that small American towns are more complex than they imagine — that die-hard liberals like me can still magically live alongside conservative Republicans — that sometimes we even find some common ground and share a meal together, and take the time to try to understand each other’s viewpoints. You see, we’re definitely not perfect here in Fergus Falls, and many of us feel a lot of responsibility right now, considering that our friends, family and neighbors voted against their own interests in 2016. But we also know how it feels to be ignored in policy and media for decades only to be lectured by ignorant articles such as this after so much silence about our challenges.

A small hunch on my part: Relotius probably figured no one from the hick town would read his article – Americans don’t know second languages after all,* and have never heard of things like Google Translate or, you know, actually KNOW foreign languages or at least someone who does. So why make it true to life when he could just write the kind of fiction he wants to write.

(There’s a link to Der Speigel’s investigation into Relotius’ fabrications in the Star-Tribune article, but it’s protected by a snarly German anti-ad blocker bot thing.)

When journalists and news organizations publish fake news, it makes the stupid cries of “Fake News” we hear coming from our President and his ardent supporters sound – bear with me here – at least somewhat plausible. Viz, via the Washington Post:

But at a time when political parties are deeply polarized on both sides of the Atlantic, the Spiegel controversy could also bolster those who now regularly portray reporting as “fake news.” As a publication that often allows its reporters to include subjective observations in their stories, Spiegel’s anti-Trump cover pieces had been widely shared in liberal circles in recent years. The fact that Relotius was initially exposed because of a story from the United States was immediately used to discredit the magazine’s wider coverage.

On Twitter, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party wrote: “CNN Journalist of the Year 2014 is #FakeNews. Enjoy #TeamTrump.” The party’s regional branch in the southern city of Heidelberg went on to suggest that other stories published by the magazine must also be fabricated, given the scale of the scandal.

Even Trump’s supporters deserve better treatment than what they got in Fergus Falls.

*Just in my family alone are members who speak French (like myself) Korean, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, and Cantonese.