Claas Relotius: the journalist as con man and “storyteller”
The con goes deep with this one:
An award-winning German journalist who was recently found to have fabricated parts of stories may be facing more trouble.
Claas Relotius, 33, is facing new accusations that he solicited donations for orphans of the war in Syria, donations that he ultimately pocketed, reported CBS.
The money he collected was for children he’d profiled, but at least one of them was apparently a figment of his creative imagination. It’s not clear how much money he raised, and it’s not certain he took the money although it’s suspected and will be further investigated. He also wrote other stories about the imaginary orphan and his attempts to bring the children to Germany for adoption, and these tales were also untrue.
Nothing about this surprises me, because a con man is a con man. It’s also unsurprising that there are so many liars in journalism; Relotius is hardly alone in this. After all, a “higher truth” is superior to the mere factual truth, especially when you’re intent on saving the world.
Jay Rosen, a more old-fashioned journalist, doesn’t seem to get it:
I don't know how our journalists came to see "storytelling" as the heart of what they do, and "storyteller" as a self-description. I can think of 4-5 elements of journalism more central than "story." Truthtelling, grounding public conversation in fact, verification… listening.
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 25, 2018
I think it’s pretty obvious how it came to be so accepted that journalists should be telling “stories” and that these stories have a moral and a political aim. It coincides with the greater use of the word “journalists” to describe what used to be known as “reporters.” It also (as I wrote Monday) has to do with the relative youth of today’s journalists and their lack of apprenticeship in the salt mines of straight reporting of mundane stories. Instead, they tend to be the product of journalism schools.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that the vast majority of today’s journalists are liberals or leftists. That’s the atmosphere in which young journalists are steeped. There’s also the influence of post-modernism and its teaching that truth is relative and that the narrative is all.
The phenomenon of “stories” taking the place of truth is multiply-determined.
It isn’t just the journalists who become con artists. In my earlier life I was more or less a journalist, and I was amazed at how often the people I interviewed flat-out lied to me.
Of course, getting your bogus story in front of a huge audience can be priceless–witness the recent Theranos con job that sucked in reporters from Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and others whose public endorsement helped the company achieve a billion-dollar valuation with no viable product.
It also (as I wrote Monday) has to do with the relative youth of today’s journalists and their lack of apprenticeship in the salt mines of straight reporting of mundane stories. Instead, they tend to be the product of journalism schools.
Which reminds me of what I learned in 7th grade about the basics of a newspaper article: who, what, where, how, why, and when. That should be more basic to journalism than crafting a “story,” but apparently “changing the world” is more important these days.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote in 1807:
The journolists who spin tales, craft frames, or force close associations that are motivated by political congruence as a rule, and others as the exception.
I’d draw a distinction between the hard core inveterate confidence artist, and someone who frequently engages in lies and modest manipulation for personal gain. I think the former is a type of sociopathy where they take a great deal pleasure from the harm they inflict by bankrupting people or similar. A rather horrifying depiction is given in the film The Grifters by S. Frears.
Relotias perhaps was just promoting himself through various lies, though the one item that smells like a con is his extensive attack on this Fergus Falls administrator Andrew Bremseth.
I do think many, but not most, Democrat and a few Republican pols fall into the confidence artist category, even if the damage they inflict is only on the masses. As an aside, it is probably very rare that we ever hear about the individual damage done as a politician schemes his or her way to the top.
Jay Rosen of NYU no less; I suspect he does know how “it” happened, but it won’t fit in a tweet. Bless him for attempting to fight the good fight.
I think it begins with literary giants like Charles Dickens and maybe Victor Hugo taking down the aristocracy by at least a few notches. Many English Profs. today would be card carrying communist party members if they were honest.
A few years ago I was reading about Victor’s daughter Adele Hugo, and I didn’t realize what a huge deal he was socially and politically. It seems that Hugo was something of a political changer from a royalist to a republican. Though he later had to renounce conservatism in order to support his increasingly leftist ideas. (Wikipedia)
I’m no historian, but it is likely that efforts of people like Dickens and Hugo were intelligent and even just and positive for the environment in which they lived. Would you have been a supporter of capital punishment then? But they taught the power brokers of the western world about the power of “the story.”
NRO has a piece up on the importance of local journalists:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/conservatives-should-support-local-news-outlets/
If we want to restrict federal legislative and regulative overreach and really return to more federalism, this is what we need.
A lot of the issue is that stories sell. That is, the editors and owners of newspapers found that something written as a narrative with all the drama and plot control that comes with that sold many more papers than a straight up recitation of the facts. (See Gail Wynand’s description of his test of this in The Fountainhead).
To be a successful reporter, defined as someone the editors and publishers like, you have to present your reporting as a story. This produces stories where the reporter finds a person affected by the issue and tells about the issue from that person’s perspective. More dramatic. Less factual and useful to analysis.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
When the media began to discuss their work as narratives, that was a clue to when they began to create storytelling. If you listen to NPR, nearly everything is a narrative, to create an emotional bond to the direction they want to point. Very few facts are given but the heartstrings are well played for their position.
The largest current narrative is Orange Man Bad. Trump cannot be ‘normalized’ and any supporters must be marginalized. This is why there are no fawning profiles of his wife and family in any magazines. Any and all rumors against him must be published and distributed loudly while corrections are late and whispered.
The narrative is supreme and all must shout it to be part of the superior crowd. Culture, such as Hollywood, Broadway and music must support the narrative as well.
Not to mention that so many of them are leftists/liberals/progressives/Democrats.
If this keeps, we might soon be inundated with sex-crazed shamans posing as religious leaders.
… Um, hold on a sec.
See my previous comment about my naïve days as a journalism student and subsequent walkaway from it. I never looked back or regretted that choice. I pay my bills doing something that requires facts and I would be very unhappy in a journalism career as the industry stands. Everything that horrified me 30 years ago is exponentially worse and actively embraced by stupid children entering the field now.
Here in the post-print modern day, there’s almost no vestige of journalism as even having a professed ideal of delivering straight news to its audience. As noted above, it’s all about a “narrative.” Cut down to its basic block, it’s all about propaganda. This is why only certain angles of certain stories are ever aired on MSM. If the truth doesn’t fit the “narrative,” then the truth is ignored. If the truth doesn’t fit the narrative well, embellish the truth as needed or ignore the parts that are problematic. If nothing with a grain of truth is there, then just make something up from scratch. At this point, the target audience doesn’t care about the truth, so the exposure of fabulists does not bother anyone for a moment. Delivering the right message is more important to these people than the message being true.
“If the truth…”
Um, I believe that we’re forgetting here that the elites have pretty much succeeded in convincing themselves that they’ve convinced most of us deplorables that there is no TRUTH.
(Or more accurately, TRUTH, for them, is what promotes their agenda. Most everything else is UNTRUTH.)
Which certainly makes things a lot “easier” for them. And lucrative, too (gosh, now who would have thought that?)
Besides, lying can be lots of fun! Pulling the wool over millions—billions!!—of people! Slandering guys! Gals! Political opponents! Countries! Religions?
Getting those echo chambers up and running…so that eventually, they run all by themselves!!
Major, major rush!
(Yessir, we can definitely get used to this! And it’s so easy, really.)
Consequences, you say? C’mon, what consequences??! (Aw man, don’t be such a drag….):
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/12/temple-reaches-55-million-settlement-in-us-news-rankings-scandal.html
Of course there are consequences, societal consequences. We’ve been watching that “chicken come home to roost” since Bill Clinton.
Just as there is objective truth, easily demonstrated by gravity’s effect when the believer in reality’s ‘relativism’ jumps out a ten story window… which of course they won’t actually do because, in their heart of hearts, they know it’s a bunch of bull.
They insist it’s so to excuse their desire to “Do what thy wilt shall be the whole of the law”. At base, it’s rebellion against God. It’s why the left never speaks of “inalienable rights” and has substituted “human rights”.
Years ago a blogger was advocating that truth was relative. I asked him if that was absolutely true or just relatively true and didn’t get a reply.
Everybody knows that journalists are corrupt and dishonest. When they aren’t lying by commission they are lying by omission.
Just watched the move “True Story” about a NYT reporter who was even too dishonest for the Times. The clarifying moment in the movie for me is when the reporter, who told his criminal subject that he better tell him the truth because he will find out if he doesn’t, finds out in court that he was lied to and never knew. One more interesting point, the real-life reporter is still in monthly contact to the murderer who conned him.
I had a book “Who Killed CBS” on my shelf of tomes about the media in general, from (gads) 1989.
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Killed-Cbs-Undoing-Americas/dp/0312915314
Basically, the author dates the downfall of what had been a highly respected and serious news-gathering entity to the early eighties, with a preference in management for ‘news-as-‘entertainment’ with hissable villains, plucky heroes, and an uplifting narrative … rather than the ambiguities and context.
So – the rot spread – although, truth to be told, even the previous news management at CBS and other outlets were not all that Simon-pure.
Sgt Mom,
Cronite killed CBS and with it all media journalism, when he lied about the Tet offensive. The media knew it was a lie and let him get away with it. As America’s most famous, well known journalist… Cronkite gave his ‘stamp of approval’ to lying “for the greater good”. In doing so, Cronkite placed his imprimatur upon the ‘principle’ that the end justifies whatever means are necessary to achieve it.
It just took a decade or so for the ‘tree’ that Cronkite had planted to bear ‘fruit’.
I loved this description:
“A beautiful lie.” That is the headline on the essay in Zeit Online quoted above, in which Pörksen, a professor of media studies, discusses the form of the story: “What shows up here is called the narrative distortion, story bias. You have the story in your head, you know what sound readers or colleagues want to hear. And you deliver what works.” And it worked. Relotius was so well-known for his style that his magazine had a label for it: “the Relotius sound.”
https://medium.com/whither-news/the-spiegel-scandal-and-the-seduction-of-storytelling-bfed804d7b21
Having one’s own sound is great for a musician. Less so for journalists.
Good comments. And in particular, remember Jefferson’s observation, which Ann quotes above.
La plus ça change, so forth.
We would do well to remember that there’s nothing new about blatant dishonesty in the “news.” Nor about “If it bleeds, it leads.” This is not some condition newly visited upon us because Marxism or because the Great Frog hates us.
Also, well before there was Cronkite, there was Walter Duranty. The true bottom line about Stalinist Soviet Russia was not unknown, but Duranty successfully sold his fabrications just the same.
The press has been twisted and bad forever. General Sherman said he wanted to shoot all the reporters “but it wouldn’t do any good because there would be dispatches from Hell by breakfast”.
The difference is that before tv, every city had multiple newspapers that split roughly half and half, Republican and Democrat. You could read several of them and get some outline of the truth. The MSM today is almost monolithically totalitarian left Democrat leaving you blind to many facts and developments that don’t fit the agenda.
Julie near Chicago:
It always helps journalists to know they are on the correct side of the arc of history.
The link below is an interesting exercise in making movie trailers that could “fit” the film into different genres just by selecting the scenes to be included. Everything in each trailer really is in the show, but what a difference the editing makes to your expectations going in!
As with the Times and WaPo, and a few others, it demonstrates how everything they say can be independently true, and yet the article as a whole be totally false.
Of course, Relotius et al. were not even telling the truth, but once you accept that spinning is not only okay, but admirable, it isn’t a long step to fabrication.
And of course there are all the examples noted above.
Anyway, watch this just for fun if nothing else.
Zootopia Trailers in 7 Different Genres
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NezWUqPDwNA
huxley on December 26, 2018 at 6:57 pm at 6:57 pm said:
(links to https://medium.com/whither-news/the-spiegel-scandal-and-the-seduction-of-storytelling-bfed804d7b21)
I was totally onboard with this article by Jeff Jarvis especially the first paragraph quoted below, and then I read the next paragraph.
” I wrote just yesterday that journalists should be demanding of themselves what they are demanding of Facebook and Silicon Valley: transparency, ethical self-examination, criticism of the moral hazards of our business models and metrics, and honesty about our loss in trust.
Out of obvious necessity, Germany has made a skill out of blunt self-examination. As they have done with their history, I hope they do with their journalism and I hope we can learn from them. In the age of America’s Trump, the United Kingdom’s Brexit, Germany’s AfD, Russia’s Putin, France’s gilets jaunes, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the Philippines’ Duterte, Turkey’s Erdo?an, Hungry’s Orbán, Venezuela’s Maduro, Saudi Arabia’s MBS, China’s Xi?—?and on and on?—?we can agree that we need journalism more than ever and journalism needs to be tougher on itself and more accountable to its public than ever.”
No recognition that we needed journalism, not propaganda, in the age of Obama, EU manipulation of national elections, Stalin’s Russia, Iran’s Ayatollahs, Pallywood, etc. — even the guy trying to remove the blinkers is blind in at least one eye.
Jim Geraghty highlights a quote from Der Spiegel “apologizing” for their reporter & themselves. [bold in the original]
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/people-believe-fake-news-because-they-want-it-to-be-true/
“But notice that this section at the end of the magazine’s apology letter:
As an editor and section head, your first reaction when receiving stories like this is to be pleased, not suspicious. You are more interested in evaluating the story based on criteria such as craftsmanship, dramaturgy and harmonious linguistic images than on whether it’s actually true. And Relotius always delivered excellent stories that required little editing and were very rewarding.
That sentence in bold should be a giant, flashing, red and neon danger sign. Spiegel is offering a good description of the job of a fiction editor.
Why do people believe stories that aren’t true? Because they either find it plausible enough that they don’t feel any need for wariness or further investigation, or because they want it to be true.”
Oped writers and “journalists” in America need to be aware of the same situation here, and vet themselves and their colleagues more skeptically before repeating something that’s too good to check.
Relotious is not the only “reporter” peddling fiction.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/12/helping-the-ap-get-it-straight.php
“Michael Doran retweets Omri Ceren’s correction of the AP (below) with the comment: “In order to fuel its attacks on Trump, the press is actively, constantly rewriting the history of Obama’s Iran concessions. You can see it in real time below.” We are suffocating in media lies and Orwellian revision of recent history. It is exceedingly difficult to keep the facts straight. Orwell himself put it this way: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The AP makes it all but impossible.”
Far as I can see, the problem for journalists about other journalists is …they got caught.
Reliotious does for journalism what Lance Armstrong did for professional cycling. Both personify corrupt organizations.
“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.”
Malcolm Muggeridge
The difference is that before tv, every city had multiple newspapers that split roughly half and half, Republican and Democrat.
Yes. Chicago, where I grew up, had newspapers that covered all sides. The Tribune was crazy right (Col Mac), the Sun Times was pretty far left and the Daily News, was, as I recall, kind of centrist. Frank Knox was the publisher and the VP nominee with Alf Landon in 1936. Roosevelt made him Sec Navy.
I kind of wonder why they are all leftist these days. Maybe talk radio has taken their place on the right.
Why do people believe stories that aren’t true?
AesopFan: As humans we are wired to process information in story form. It’s a fast, effective way to understand the world and to share it powerfully with others. In harder times stories could make the difference in a group’s survival.
Of course, that doesn’t make stories true. One of the great contributions of Western thought has been the attempt to examine stories objectively.
In chess there’s a proverb that a bad plan is better than no plan. Similarly, with humans a bad story is better than no story.
AesopFan;
Yes indeed, too good to fact check.
Also, if an editor doesn’t have to edit the copy, he/she is often quite happy.