Fired Der Spiegel star reporter took 'fake news' to 11

Der Spiegel fired one of its star editor-reporters for Jayson Blair-like fabrications, and sure enough, his most famous fake stories supported the most annoyingly eurotrashy left-wing "narratives" we've had thrown in our faces for years.  Here's a typical Der Spiegel cover to give you the flavor of this outfit.  Here's another.

According to the New York Times:

The German magazine Der Spiegel said on Wednesday that it had fired an award-winning journalist for fabricating "on a grand scale" in his articles, weaving invented quotations and characters into over a dozen major articles.

The reporter and editor, Claas Relotius, confessed to creating the falsehoods after an investigation by the magazine, Der Spiegel said in a statement.  The magazine is one of Europe's leading news publications.

The articles with false or manipulated material include several that were nominated for journalism prizes, or won them, including articles about Iraqi children kidnapped by the Islamic State, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, and Syrian orphans forced to work in a Turkish sweat shop.

Gitmo?  Iraqi children?  Syrian orphans, all victims of U.S. policies?  Don't forget the one that actually did him in (mentioned at the bottom of the NYT piece, while being ignored altogether by CNN): casting Trump-supporters as backward boobs out in the benighted heartland.  Alert Minnesota citizens checked up on his phony characterizations and dumped the final straw out there in a bombshell piece in today's Medium, which forced Der Spiegel to expose him as their own German Jayson Blair.  Here's how the thing started out:

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.

...and the phony end-product that the eurotrash lapped up:

Not only did Relotius' "exposé" on Fergus Falls make unrecognizable movie-like characters out of the people in my town that I interact with on a daily basis, but its very basic lack of truth and its bizarrely bleak portrayal of the place I love left a very sick, unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach.

There's really nothing like this feeling  –  knowing that people in another country have read about the place I call home and are shaking their heads over their coffee in disgust, sharing the article on Facebook and Twitter, and making comments on the online article like "creepy," and "these are the people who don't believe electricity exists."

Here's the problem: this guy got awards for this claptrap, and he got the awards because he knew exactly what the journalistic establishment that doles out the awards wanted.  CNN gave him two awards, including one for "Journalist of the Year."  Forbes named him as a top under-30 reporter, something that was sure to enhance his credibility – and power to influence.  Easy to do when you make the story up.

What's more, his fraud-filled reportage, biased just the way the leftist establishment likes it, was spread all over the mainstream press.  According to CNN, the Financial Times Deutschland ran his fake news.  So did Die Welt.  So did Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.  With journalism being an art of sorts, you can bet U.S. presses picked up on those pieces as part of the trend and either wrote stories just like them or cited his, spreading his fake product like a virus. 

That's important because we've been flooded with these phony "narratives" over the years about how bad we supposedly are on Gitmo, in Iraq, around the issue of "the children," and other supposed crimes.  Those were this liar's specialty, his ticket to the top.  And with him on top, anyone who might have tried to provide a truthful rendering of what was going on would have been squelched as an "extremist" due to all the groupthink that got the hooks in, as he stood there as the standard.

It's more than egg on this paper's face; it's an indictment of the lousy phony "narratives" we have been subject to as the supposed bad guy in every news story about the U.S.  It's time to flip the script.  This guy is what we call fake news, and there he was, right there in the middle of some of the most honored spots in journalism.

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