http://www.dailywire.com/news/39530/winner-cnns-journalist-year-award-admits-he-made-ryan-saavedra
http://hotair.com/archives/2018/12/19/award-winning-german-reporter-admits-faking-elements-dozen-stories/
Claas Relotius is a German journalist who just this year won a Reporter of the Year award in his home country. But today, Der Spiegel, the magazine where Relotius has worked for the past seven years, announced that he had admitted to more than a dozen instances of fraud after being confronted by another reporter. From the Guardian:
Earlier this month, he won Germany's Reporterpreis (Reporter of the Year) for his story about a young Syrian boy, which the jurors praised for its "lightness, poetry and relevance." It has since emerged that all the sources for his reportage were at best hazy, and much of what he wrote was made up.
The falsification came to light after a colleague who worked with him on a story along the US-Mexican border raised suspicions about some of the details in Relotius's reporting, having harboured doubts about him for some time.
The colleague, Juan Moreno, eventually tracked down two alleged sources quoted extensively by Relotius in the article, which was published in November. Both said they had never met Relotius. Relotius had also lied about seeing a hand-painted sign that read "Mexicans keep out," a subsequent investigation found.
Other fraudulent stories included one about a Yemeni prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, and one about the American football star Colin Kaepernick.
One story Relotius wrote last year was about a small town in Minnesota called Fergus Falls. If you're guessing that this was a Gorillas In the Mist style feature designed to make middle-America look bad, you are exactly correct. Michele Anderson, who lives in Fergus Falls, remembers meeting Relotius last February when he came to live in the area for three weeks to supposedly get a clear view of small-town America. She was immediately skeptical about his motives:
I know I'm not the only rural advocate and citizen that is wary about the anthropological gaze on rural America in the wake of the 2016 elections, and has struggled with how or whether to respond to the sudden attention and questions, when before we really didn't matter to mass media at all.
Suddenly we do matter, but only because everyone wants to be the hero pundit that cracks the code of the current rural psyche. There are only two things those writers seem to have concluded or are able to pitch to their editors - we are either backwards, living in the past and have our heads up our asses, or we're like dumb, endearing animals that just need a little attention in order to keep us from eating the rest of the world alive.
When Der Spiegel finally published his 7,000 word story on Fergus Falls, Michele Anderson found her own town unrecognizable. She and a friend were so skeptical of so many details that they set out to catalogue the errors in the piece and worked on doing so for nearly a year. Today, after word broke that Relotius had been fired, Anderson published a list of the top 11 errors in his piece on Medium. ...
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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