Der Spiegel Fires Award-Winning Writer, Citing Fabrication on ‘Grand Scale’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/world/europe/der-spiegel-claas-relotius.html

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The German magazine Der Spiegel said on Wednesday that it had fired an award-winning journalist for fabricating “on a grand scale” in his articles, weaving invented quotations and characters into over a dozen major articles.

The reporter and editor, Claas Relotius, confessed to creating the falsehoods after an investigation by the magazine, Der Spiegel said in a statement. The magazine is one of Europe’s leading news publications.

The articles with false or manipulated material include several that were nominated for journalism prizes, or won them, including articles about Iraqi children kidnapped by the Islamic State, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, and Syrian orphans forced to work in a Turkish sweat shop.

“Claas Relotius committed his deception intentionally, methodically,” Der Spiegel said, inserting into his articles made-up dialogue, people he had never met and “composite characters of people who actually did exist but whose stories Relotius had fabricated.”

Mr. Relotius, 33, had been writing for the magazine since 2011, and he admitted to making up parts of at least 14 articles in Der Spiegel, the magazine said. That figure could rise, it added. Mr. Relotius wrote almost 60 articles for Der Spiegel, and as a freelancer wrote for a variety of German-language newspapers and magazines.

He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In one article, about Fergus Falls, Minn., Mr. Relotius told of a coal plant employee named Neil Becker (who does not exist), related an anecdote about a restaurant employee (to whom he gave a fictional illness and a misnamed son) and described the view of a power plant from a cafe (whose few windows provide no such view), according to Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, two residents of the town who, baffled by the claims, spent a year researching them.

“It was such a weird story, it was so completely different than the town and the people that we knew,” Mr. Krohn said in an interview. “We thought we were at first completely missing something.”

Mr. Krohn and Ms. Anderson initially tried to contact Der Spiegel on Twitter, they said, but eventually decided to investigate the article’s claims on their own. Mr. Krohn, a technology consultant, and Ms. Anderson, who works in a community arts program, published their work on Medium after learning Mr. Relotius had been fired.

In one instance, Ms. Anderson said, Mr. Relotius falsely attached the words “Home of Damn Good Folks” to a sign that merely says “Welcome to Fergus Falls.”

“I just couldn’t believe he would be that lazy and just assume that we wouldn’t come across that and find that,” she said. “Why do that?”

More serious, she said, were cases in which Mr. Relotius seemed to have invented quotations for real people, “and then put the story out in the world and not care how it affects them.”

In its statement, the magazine said that concerns were first brought to its editors in November by another journalist, Juan Moreno, who reported with Mr. Relotius on an article about a vigilante group operating at the United States border with Mexico.

Der Spiegel has added notes to Mr. Relotius’s articles, saying they will remain unchanged until an investigation is completed.

The case has recalled other cases of fabrication in journalism, including those by Stephen Glass, a magazine writer whose inventions were found out in 1998; Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter who resigned in 2003 after editors discovered “frequent acts of journalistic fraud”; and Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for an article the paper later determined to be untrue.