CNN Journalist of the Year — Fraud ‘on Grand Scale’: Top Journalist at Reputable German Magazine Faked His Stories for YEARS
- Fraud ‘on Grand Scale’: Top Journalist at Reputable German Magazine Faked His Stories for YEARS
by https://www.rt.com/
One of Germany’s most popular papers, Der Spiegel, has found itself at the center of a scandal involving one of its top reporters who was caught fabricating elements of his stories.
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Claas Relotius, who worked at Der Spiegel as a freelancer for 6 years until receiving a staff position in 2017, seemed to be a paragon of modern journalism. The 33-year-old has received numerous prestigious journalism awards, both in Germany and abroad.
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Just this December he was awarded a prize by the German reporter’s association for his story about the life of a child in Syria. In 2014, Relotius was warmly welcomed by CNN who named him ‘Journalist of the Year.’
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However, his seemingly brilliant career has turned out to be a house of cards that is now falling apart, just as it had with Stephen Glass, a former staff writer at the New Republic who authored one of the most spectacular fabrication campaigns in the history of American journalism.
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It was recently revealed that Relotius literally made up details in his stories and even “invented protagonists” – people he had never met in person. One of his colleagues who was working with Relotius on a story about the situation on the US-Mexican border grew suspicious of some of the details in the journalist’s report. The man then tracked down two alleged sources Relotius quoted extensively in his text, only to find out that none of them ever actually met him.
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The subsequent investigation by Der Spiegel into Relotius’ activities also uncovered that he fabricated details in another story including a claim that he had seen a sign in a US town that read: “Mexicans keep out.” When faced with the incriminating evidence, the journalist confessed to faking elements of his texts – not just in one story, but in a number of them.
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