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Tag Archives: Fake News
The Money Was Real, Though
Fake news reporters may fake their news like there’s no tomorrow but they rarely want anything to do with fake money.
Der Spiegel said Sunday it would file a criminal complaint against a disgraced reporter after it emerged he may have embezzled donations intended for Syrian street children.
Claas Relotius, 33, resigned this month after admitting to making up stories and inventing protagonists in more than a dozen articles in the magazine’s print and online editions.
Spiegel said it now had information that Relotius allegedly launched a campaign for readers to give money to help subjects of an article he wrote but that the bank details he gave directed the funds to his own account.
Spiegel said concerned readers had in recent days reported Relotius’ call for donations purportedly for orphaned Syrian children living on the streets of Turkey.
“Der Spiegel will give all the information it collects to public prosecutors as part of a criminal complaint.”
PS: And on that happy note, Merry Christmas!
Institutional Bias?
At Der Spiegel? At CNN? And systematically practiced by practically everybody else out there working in the media’s “mediation” machine?
No way. Or… Way? Wow. Who would have thought that possible?
The US government has waded into the scandal of the German journalist for Der Spiegel magazine who faked stories on a grand scale over years, calling it proof of “institutional bias” in the media against America.
In a scathing letter to the magazine’s editors, Richard Grenell, US ambassador to Germany, claims the journalism of Claas Relotius, who resigned from the German news magazine last week, was symptomatic of anti-American bias across the mainstream media. “It is clear that we were the victims of a campaign of institutional bias,” Grenell wrote to Der Spiegel, in a letter also seen by the daily newspaper Bild. He said he was aghast at the way “anti-American coverage” had been facilitated by the magazine.
“We are aware that the Relotius case makes the fight against fake news that much more difficult. For everyone. For for other media outlets that are on our side and for citizens and politicians who are interested in an accurate portrayal of reality.”
German Fake News Scandal Reaches Fergus Falls, Minnesota
“Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.”
“In 7,300 words he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct, and a few other basic things, like the names of businesses and public figures, things that a child could figure out in a Google search. The rest is uninhibited fiction (even as sloppy as citing an incorrect figure of citywide 70.4% electoral support for Trump, when the actual number was 62.6%), which begs the question of why Der Spiegel even invested in Relotius’ three week trip to the U.S., whether they should demand their money back from him, and what kind of institutional breakdown led to the supposedly world-class Der Spiegel fact-checking team completely dropping the ball on this one.”
If It’s Not In Der Spiegel, It Didn’t Happen
Unfortunately, that’s also the case even when it is in Der Spiegel.
And here y’all thought that fake news was fake.
Award-winning journalist Claas Relotius wrote fake news, German magazine Der Spiegel says.
An award-winning journalist who worked for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s leading news outlets, has left the weekly magazine after evidence emerged that he committed journalistic fraud “on a grand scale” over a number of years, the publication said Wednesday…
Spiegel’s revelations echoed past instances of journalistic fraud by reporters elsewhere, including Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Christopher Newton of The Associated Press and Janet Cooke, whose 1980 piece about a child addicted to heroin won The Washington Post writer a Pulitzer Prize before it was exposed as untrue.
Er hat nach Meinung der Jury des Deutschen Reporterpreises 2018 wieder die beste Reportage des Jahres geschrieben, über einen syrischen Jungen diesmal, der im Glauben lebt, durch einen Kinderstreich den Bürgerkrieg im Land mit ausgelöst zu haben. Die Juroren würdigen einen Text “von beispielloser Leichtigkeit, Dichte und Relevanz, der nie offenlässt, auf welchen Quellen er basiert.”
“Trump Still Clicks”
CNN title: Trump’s been president for two years. Germans still can’t look away. Nor will they look away. Because they can’t.
Why should this surprise anyone? This a perfectly normal everady pathological German obsession, no different than their irrational infatuation with Obama before Trump and their Verteufelung (demonization) of Bush before him (and on and on it goes). Germans are hysterical in these matters. It’s a collective psychological issue, an obsession with US-Amerika in the end. What is more, this collective hysteria is very profitable for the brain police in German media who milk it daily.
I’ve always liked this guy’s take on it (a Spiegel man himself): “German schadenfreude knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the United States. The country loves to feel superior to a superpower like America. Yet Germany also harbors a childish infatuation with Obama — one which has little political grounding. The reasons are psychological. …The criticism of America has always been a bit infantile. One is familiar with the theory from psychoanalysis, when people talk about transference, or when suppressed feelings or emotions are overcome by projecting them onto others. It may work for a while, improving one’s feeling of self-worth by devaluing an imagined adversary. But it always falls short. Which is why the ritual must be constantly carried out anew.” – Jan Fleischhauer
Over two floors of Der Spiegel’s glasshouse building, walls bearing seven decades of the magazine’s covers serve as a colorful chronology of modern history. On one wall are cartoons of an angry yellow-haired man that are so provocative they’re impossible to miss.
“Trump still clicks, people are interested in those stories — and the same applies to our magazine stories and covers.”
Der Spiegel Analyzes The “Kavanaugh Disaster”
As only Der Spiegel can. And oddly, they almost got it right.
For one thing, they were honest enough to admit that it was a disaster – for them, of course – because “the President and the Republicans achieved a great victory.” And then they continue on with their five-point explanation of why this is such an awful, terrible and unspeakably bad thing.
1. Trumpism reigns. They got that right, too.
2. The Kavanaugh nomination was a farce. They almost got that right. The nomination itself wasn’t a farce, of course, but the freak show that accompanied it most certainly was.
3. Consensus culture is a foreign word. Absolutely correct. Take Germany, for instance, where they call it Konsenskultur. Every German knows that there is no consensus when it comes to Angela Merkel’s migrant madness meltdown, for example, but the difference between Germany and US-Amerika here is that the Germans behave as if there is. Germans normally being the all too direct ones, it is the Americans this time who make no qualms about how divided they are in Trump America.
4. There are no clear rules for dealing with accusations. Not true. Making false accusations, like the ones made against Kavanaugh here, is against the law. American laws allow those falsely accused of a crime to pursue a course of action in court, generally based on defamation of character. And this, I believe, needs to be done here.
5. The Supreme Court is now in a real mess. Well, they got the mess part right, I guess. But the Supreme Court mess is now in the process of being cleaned up, although there is certainly still quite a bit of work yet to do.
All in all, a solid job, Spiegel journalists. I’ll give you a seven for your five points this time. Keep the change.
Mit der Wahl von Donald Trumps Kandidaten Brett Kavanaugh zum Richter auf Lebenszeit am Supreme Court haben der US-Präsident und die Republikaner einen großen Erfolg errungen.
It’s Not Supposed To Grow
The AfD’s popularity. But it keeps on growing. How can that be?
Anyone “good German” you ask will explain to you that the AfD is “bad” and “racist” and “Nazi” and “completely unacceptable.” The friendly people from the German media will explain that to you, too. How could such an awful group of people keep on growing in popularity? Something must be wrong somewhere. What on earth could it be?
The AFD is benefiting from being the official opposition to Chancellor Merkel’s grand coalition government. Polls rate it Germany’s second most popular party, dropping the Social Democrats to third.
It’s Not Nice To Fool Mother Nature
Or fool with her, I should say. Aka The Empress of Europe. Aka Mutti.
Get in the sack, Mr. Maasen. Come on, get in the sack. It’s time to sack you. You criticized my choice of words. You suggested I have a hand in Germany’s fake news industrial lying press complex. I don’t have a hand in it. I run the damned thing. It is time for you to go.
Rival political factions have been locked in a bitter war of words ever since Mr Maasen, the head of domestic intelligence service the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) contradicted Mrs Merkel over the veracity of a video appearing to show foreigners being attacked on the streets on Chemnitz by neo-Nazi extremists.
Laut einem Bericht lässt Kanzlerin Merkel Verfassungsschutzchef Maaßen fallen – ohne Rücksicht auf dessen Chef Innenminister Seehofer.
That’s A Shocker
Not.
The Head of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a long name for their spooky spy FBI-type folks), Hans-Georg Maaßen, has had the unmitigated audacity to announce that he has seen no evidence indicating that there was any hounding of refugees going on during the protests in Chemnitz.
He maintains that a video seemingly depicting as much was circulated to distract from the murder that had caused the protests in the first place.
That can’t be, though. That would be fake news. The Germans enjoy state TV. And if it’s not in German state TV, well, it didn’t happen. Or vice versa. Or both. I forget.
Hans-Georg Maaßen sagt, er habe keine Informationen über Hetzjagden in Chemnitz. Ein entsprechendes Video sei wohl gestreut worden, um von dem “Mord” abzulenken.
