Guest Post by The Zman
Last week, the German publication Der Spiegel was forced to fire its star performer, when it was revealed he was a fabulist. Claas Relotius had written for the publication for close to a decade. He had been handed several awards by other media organs. His exposure as a serial fabricator was the result of his piece on the small town of Fergus Falls Minnesota, after the 2016 election. The thrust of his story was that rural America voted for Trump, because it is full of xenophobic weirdos and economic losers.
His mistake was to pick on a small town in the age of the internet. The yokels were able to look up the article and compare his version of reality with their own. More important, they could go to a popular platform and post their reactions to his article, so the world could then compare his work to reality. Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, who live in Fergus Falls, posted their analysis of the article on Medium. Eventually, it took over a year, Der Spiegel was forced to address the issue publicly.
In Germany, this is quite a scandal in media circles, because Der Spiegel is like their version of New York Times. That is, it positions itself as the official arbiter of truth, with regards to public morality. They not only decide what is true, they decide which truths can be said. Worse yet for them, they have been bragging about their fact checking for a long time. As a result of this tent pole toppling over, the German media is scrambling to convince everyone that it is an isolated incident, not a system failure.
The amusing bit is the German media is rushing around looking puzzled, as to how the vaunted fact checking system could have failed. After all, the best people are in control of the media. How could the best people have made such basic errors? As is the case in America, whenever these things happen, the media hand-wringing is just a dodge. What really concerns them is how easy it was for two bumpkins from dirt country to sluice out the facts from the fiction in this particular article.
That’s always the thing with these scandals. The media big shots always come off as if they have been insulted about their shenanigans being revealed. In this case, the other major media outfits are rallying to defend Der Spiegel. In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the main stream media, the opposite is always true. They circle the wagons and begin lecturing the hoi polloi about the dangers of questioning the media.
That is the real cause of these scandals. For a long time, the mass media in the West has been a mono-culture. You can’t have a career in the media if you don’t hold all the right opinions. To call the media an echo chamber for the left is to understate the problem. The better analogy is a school of fish. Each individual just reacts to those around him, given the effect of the school having agency as a whole. What looks like collusion is just the result of a uniformity of mind, experience and social class.
That’s why no one at Der Spiegel, or anywhere else in the German media, noticed the fraudulence of Claas Relotius. He was writing the things his coevals and superiors said at luncheons, cocktail parties and in the office. His story about slack-jawed yokels in the American heartland ticked all the boxes popular with the left-wing cultural outlook. He was not sent there to report on the place. He was sent there to confirm what his employers already knew about Middle American and Trump voters.
This is why Western media is something worse than propaganda. The person hired by the state or hired by the corporate marketing department has self-awareness. They know their job is to polish the apple of their superiors. The tricks they employ to do that are done with a knowledge and forethought. The guy telling the public that his employer, the pesticide company, is deeply concerned about the environment does so knowing full well that no one believes him, including his family.
The media is a different thing. They really believe their own nonsense. They think they are part of a special class of human, a priestly class that not only reports facts to the public, but provides moral instruction. The mass media is so intoxicated by their own self-righteousness, they lack the ability to question their own actions. When Claas Relotius came back from the bush, reporting exactly what his bosses knew was the case, they had no reason to question it. It was too good to check.
The mainstream media has always been dishonest. From the “yellow journalism” of the late 1800s and early 1900s to today’s “fake news”, journalism has shown its true (communist) roots.
From the lies about the Spanish-American war to the New York Times’ walter duranty hiding the truth about and denying the artificially engineered and forced communist “famine” in the Ukraine, to the lies about the 1968 Viet Nam communist Tet offensive (a military victory for the South Vietnamese and American troops) reported by walter cronkite as a military defeat, cronkite and his ilk were successful in prolonging the Viet Nam war for years, giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy, who bragged about being supported by the U S media.
Look at NBCs doctoring of GMC truck gas tanks, rigging them to explode, and the deliberate mischaracterization of George Zimmerman’s conversation withe the 911 dispatcher, deleting a key phrase, as well as showing Trayvon Martin as a 12-year-old cherub rather than his more recent “thug” facebook picture.
The media has become a “fifth column” of the government and is not to be trusted. The CIA has had its hooks in the media since the 1950s. In fact, Hollywood script writers were paid to insert anti-drug messages in their scripts during the “drug hysteria” period of the 1980s through 2000s. Today, we have “crisis actors” embedded in our government and media, the same “crisis actors” who keep showing up, being used in every (fake) “crisis”. The mainstream media keeps parroting these impostors, thinking that we are stupid, not being able to see through their lies and deceptions.
To our advantage, we now have the internet, which gives the ordinary citizen the ability to see through the deceptions and lies, and the capability to be real “journalists”, quite often getting and reporting the story TRUTHFULLY before the mainstream media.
In fact, there are calls by “mainstream media” to “license” journalists, in an attempt to keep these “citizen journalists” out…twenty years ago, any journalist suggesting such a scheme would have been thrown out, but nowadays…who knows?
Even when they get a good solid dose of reality, they don’t learn a damned thing. They simply are not able…
“…You know, I wanted to sit on a jury once and I was taken off the jury. And the judge said to me, ‘Can, you know, can you tell the truth and be fair?’ And I said, ‘That’s what journalists do.’ And everybody in the courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment I think I’ve ever had…” — Co-host Diane Sawyer joking on ABC’s Good Morning America July 12, 2007 following a report on how some people try to avoid serving on a jury
https://www.mrctv.org/videos/2007-notable-quotables-quote-year-runner-3
Most of the media is just a way for the owner of the company to spread his beliefs on the population. Very little objective journalism going on anymore. Canadian relatives talked to me about rednecks and stock car racing like all Americans were idiots. I asked them if beer-swilling hockey fans who got in fights represented all of Canada. Plus, If either group leaves me alone they can do their thing all they want.
I try not to think of all Germans as Nazis. or idiots who let in hoards of Muslims to destroy their country.
This journalist thought it would be easier to ridicule distant American yokels than to confront Hungarian nationalists or even AFD members in Rural Germany. The latter would involve actual physical risk and of course having to confront unpleasant realities about the failure of globalization and multiculturalism.
Ironically, this scandal is the best evidence for localism over globalism. We’re all pretty well-read and astute here on TBP. So I ask: do we feel confident enough to tell some German about how to run Germany? Obviously not. I live in New York and I don’t feel I understand the issues in Connecticut, let alone Germany or Syria.
Machiavelli understood this well. He advised the Prince to be locally available and observant. Italian folk wisdom held that anything beyond visual range from your church bell tower might as well be terra incógnita.
Last time I was in Germany was the spring of 2001 – well before the *Trrrrist Threat!!!* caused a ruckus. My time was spent in rural southern Germany in and around the Wurzburg area and most everyone I encountered could be considered a Deutsche Yokel. The only bits of multiculturalism they embraced were 3am kebabs from the Turkish street vendors after (or during) a night of drunken debauchery (though they didn’t much like the Turks personally), pizzas margherita and the various versions of Italian coffees, and the Czech strippers we trucked in for Friday nights at the local bar. I’m pretty sure all but one of the Germans I knew and went out with back then are AfD by now.
They would be equally as offended by Spiegel’s depiction of our peasantry as we are of stereotyping all Germans as Merkel-gurgling commies – which they clearly are not or AfD wouldn’t be gaining seats by leaps and bounds over CDU in the regional and increasingly national governments, Macron being shown a choice between The Door or The Guillotine, and May increasingly cornered by her own obstinate stupidity. Der Spiegel can suck a fat slimy one right after the NYT shits it out on a Pakistani sidewalk after a football riot.
He would have gotten away with, too (if it hadn’t been for you pesky kids!) if he hadn’t been so thoroughly lazy that he lied about stuff that wasn’t even pertinent. With a few more hours of effort, he could have recorded more conversations and done the usual thing – take little snippets totally out of context to weave his narrative. Instead he made up entire composite characters who provably didn’t exist. Journalists will heed the lesson: lie better.
journalists are lazy and arrogant,that’s why he made it up–
a few more hours of effort would have meant more time w/the dirt people,do you want to spend time w/dirt people,mr sandman?
You will write what we tell you to write. (Or film, sing, video, broadcast, etc.)
Journalist A.J. Liebling’s famous apothegm sums it up perfectly:
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Heres my Teutonic wish for all the fine folks at TBP:
**
**(Listen to it before Angele Merkel and other monsters decide it is VERBOTEN)
Peace on Earth. Goodwill to All.
That was beautiful.
It should be sung as the Requiem for Western Civilization as we finally slide beneath the waves of the brown ocean straining to engulf us.
The whole object of MSM journalism is to destroy any credibility that any organization has on any and every subject. Just report a bunch of made-up factoids, compelling narratives without regard to any actual truth or accuracy. After a while (and they have been at it for a while now) there is nothing but smoke and distrust everywhere. Since no one believes anything except what they WANT to believe, and there is no real ability to debunk the bullshit (this couple took a year and a half!) and clear the smoke, people just live with a vague sense of deep unease. This is all compounded by the encouraged (almost required) devotion to ones smartphone and the smoke generating apps thereon. Combine THAT with the very real ability to surveil more and more, in real time, and you can see how effective it all is. Once these folks think that EVERYONE is blinded by smoke, addled by bullshit, and content to look at their smartphones, they can cinch up the cuffs and lead us (watching our smartphone all the way) into the mines or abattoir, depending on how dark you think their end goals are.
Merry Christmas!
Here is Raul Ilargi Meijer’s take on this which is far better than anything I could post.
German guy here. I (finally) cancelled our Spiegel subscription because of the way it reported about Maidan in Ukraine. This is known here for the moment, when the last people who are able saw through the matrix. So we are now divided here, people who see, and people who buy everything, from 911 to the migration policy.
The actual case looks like an effort to fix the decreasing trust, they are making up that “single case”, demonstrate how the problem is corrected and so on, all just for the remaining sheep I mentioned above.
Nothing will change, just look up how they are reporting the old judge lady case.
Spiegel always has been a liberal front, beefing up their texts with uncommon wording right out of a dictionary, run by a family, Augstein. All said.