A fraud. A low blow to the journalistic profession, that the German weekly Der Spiegel has not been able to let go. Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of the researchers stars of his generation and of the publication has been fired for having “falsified stories of their own and invented protagonists, with what has misled readers and colleagues”.
According to the magazine in your web page, the first suspicions against the several times award-winning Relotius emerged following the publication of a report in November of 2018 from the border between the U.S. and Mexico. It was a team work, with the also journalist of Spanish origin, Juan Moreno, who, seeing the end result questioned to the editors, the veracity of some passages. Moreno was a correspondent for the El País newspaper in Berlin and later in Israel, until the journal dispensed with his services and he returned to Germany to collaborate with various media, including the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and der Siegel.
Moreno took other trips to the US to collect material against your colleague with the intention to protect himself, convinced of the great importance of the subject, and convinced that the journal or any of the people quoted would open an investigation that will involve.
At the end of last week, Relotius, according to the magazine, he accepted that he had invented whole passages not only of the history on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, but also of other stories.
In his note to the media and to their readers, Der Spiegel notes that Relotius never spoke with many of the protagonists mentioned in his work, and that what counts is based on data taken from other media and images of movies.
The reporter went so far that he even invented biographies of people who supposedly served source. It is estimated that Relotius, which is part of the template of Der Spiegel from the year and a half ago but has been collaborating since 2011, he has signed since then, some 60 reports. There are suspicions of manipulation in at least 14.
The weekly has been informed that the reports of Relotius will continue for the moment in the digital archive of Der Spiegel, though with a warning text, while it clarifies definitely the case, for what has been created a special commission. After the research, which involves analyzing the filter in the quality control of the journal, the department of which they form a part of 60 people, will make a series of recommendations to improve the mechanisms of quality control of the texts of the magazine. The damage to the reputation of the weekly, however, is already done.
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