Claas Relotius

Claas-Hendrik Relotius (born 15 November 1985) is a German former journalist. He resigned from ''Der Spiegel'' in 2018 after admitting to numerous instances of journalistic fraud.

Early life

Relotius was born in Hamburg, and grew up in Tötensen with his father, a water engineer, and his mother, a teacher. He studied political and cultural studies at the University of Bremen, graduating with a Bachelor's degree. In 2008 he was employed as an intern at '' Die Tageszeitung'' ("''taz''") in Hamburg, and from 2009 to 2011 completed a Master's degree at the . During 2013 he worked as a freelance journalist in Cuba, supported by a scholarship from the of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Career

As a freelance reporter, Relotius wrote for a number of German-language publications, including ''Cicero'', '' Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung'', ''Neue Zürcher Zeitung'', '' Financial Times Deutschland'', ''Die Tageszeitung'', '' Die Welt'', '' Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin'', ''Die Weltwoche'', ''Die Zeit'' and '' Reportagen''.

In 2017, he became a staff journalist for ''Der Spiegel'', which had published almost 60 articles by Relotius since 2011. Relotius received several awards for his reporting, including the on four occasions, most recently in 2018. The award given by Reporterpreis to Relotius in 2018 was for "Best Reportage", delivered in Berlin in early December, for a story of "unprecedented lightness, density and relevance, which never leaves open the sources on which it is based". He was the German-language CNN "Journalist of the Year" in 2014 for a story written for the Swiss magazine ''Reportagen'' and won the European Press Prize in 2017. Reporting for which he was nominated or won prizes include articles about Iraqi children kidnapped by the Islamic State, a Guantánamo Bay inmate, and Syrian orphans from Aleppo who ended up as child slaves in Turkey. In 2017, ''Der Spiegel'' sent Relotius to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, for three weeks to write an article about Donald Trump supporters "to give readers better insight into Americans". Many details in Relotius's articles, including nearly everything in the Fergus Falls story, were found to be made up. Relotius also faked interviews with the parents of NFL footballer Colin Kaepernick.

Fabrication of stories

On 19 December 2018, made public that Relotius had admitted that he had "falsified his articles on a grand scale", inventing facts, persons and quotations in at least 14 of his stories in , an event occasionally being referred to as "Spiegelgate". The magazine uncovered the fraud after a co-author of one of Relotius's articles about a pro-Trump vigilante group in Arizona conducting patrols along the Mexico–United States border, the Spanish-born journalist , became suspicious of the veracity of Relotius's contributions and gathered evidence against him.

Relotius' superiors initially supported him after he said that the allegations made against him were false, and they suspected Moreno's allegations might be slanderous. However, in the face of mounting evidence of Relotius' deceit, , the deputy head of the magazine's (society) section and Relotius' immediate supervisor, confronted Relotius and told him that she no longer believed him. The following day, Relotius confessed, and forced his resignation, calling him "neither a reporter nor a journalist". Relotius told his former colleagues that he was sick and needed to get help. left his articles accessible at the time, with a notice referring to the magazine's ongoing investigation into the fraud. In the wake of the scandal, Relotius returned four awards he received from , and CNN revoked his 2014 Journalist of the Year award. The awarded article on an Alzheimer patient in a California prison was marked by the magazine as under investigation. The issue of published on 21 December had a 23-page section on the Relotius case with a plain orange cover.

About a year earlier, two residents of Fergus Falls, Minnesota Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn suspected that Relotius' portrayal of their hometown was inaccurate. For example, Relotius lied about seeing a hand-painted welcome sign by the city limits that read: "Mexicans Keep Out". They investigated on their own when efforts to contact on Twitter came to nothing. They published their findings in a blog post on Medium, detailing 11 of Relotius' most egregious falsehoods. As Anderson put it, "In 7,300 words he really only got our town's population and average annual temperature correct".

Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, wrote to the magazine, complaining about an anti-American institutional bias () and asked for an independent investigation. Grenell wrote that "These fake news stories largely focus on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people." American journalist James Kirchick accused of long peddling "crude and sensational anti-Americanism".

The scandal was seized upon by critics of the mainstream media in Western countries and was described as a moment of crisis for German journalism. Leaders of the German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) wrote that it confirmed their view of the media as a " lying press" ().

On 23 December 2018, magazine announced that it was filing a criminal complaint against Relotius. He was accused of embezzling donations intended for Syrian orphans he claimed to have met in Turkey. Relotius appealed to readers for donations to help orphans, and the donations were paid into his personal bank account.

published its final investigation report in May 2019, concluding that "no indications were found that anyone at was aware of the fabrication, helped cover them up or otherwise participated in them", while stressing an urgent need for internal reform. Moreno wrote a book about the case, '' Tausend Zeilen Lüge'' (), which was published in 2019. The 2022 film '' A Thousand Lines'', directed by Michael "Bully" Herbig and starring Jonas Nay and Elyas M'Barek, was inspired by Moreno's book and is a fictionalised slightly satirical interpretation of the case, yet received negative reviews.

Awards

Over the course of his journalistic career, Relotius has been given a number of awards. Most of them were revoked after his fraud was discovered.

From 2012 to 2018, Relotius received a total of 19 awards in journalism, including the ''Austrian Magazine Prize'', the ''Catholic Media Prize'', the Peter Scholl Latour Prize and the ''German Reporter Prize'' four times (more often than anyone else) - three of them for the best report of the year.

In 2014, CNN named him ''Journalist of the Year''. The laudatory speech said that he talked about social problems in a "poetic" way and that he succeeded in "creating images in the head of the reader that run like a movie before her eyes." It was revoked by CNN after his fraud was discovered.

In 2017, his reports about a Yemeni in the US prison at Guantanamo and about two Syrian refugee children were awarded the ''Reemtsma Liberty Award'' and the '' European Press Prize''.

Attempts to manipulate Wikipedia

In 2019, several attempts were made to manipulate and whitewash the German-language Wikipedia article on Claas Relotius, which had only been created after the manipulation allegations in December 2018, in his favor. The manipulation attempts were carried out by several newly created sockpuppets.

See also

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Relotius, Claas
1985 births
2018 scandals
21st-century German journalists
Defamation
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel people
Fake news
Forgers
German fraudsters
Journalistic scandals
German male journalists
German newspaper journalists
German reporters and correspondents
Living people
Writers from Hamburg