What inspires someone to fill the first draft of history with lies?
Luckily, journalists don’t ask themselves this question often, but it came up twice last year when publications in Texas and Germany each discovered a reporter had quoted people who didn’t exist.
In the case of former feature writer Claas Relotius, it went deeper than that. Weekly German magazine Der Spiegel found that Relotius had fabricated sources, quotes and facts to the point that entire stories were complete works of fiction. Some of Relotius’ fully debunked stories place American politics and culture centerstage, using people who don’t exist to exacerbate damaging stereotypes.
Before last month, Relotius was a celebrated, four-time recipient of the German Reporter Prize. Yet, even his short biography contained information that a Der Spiegel review couldn’t confirm.
In Texas, The Houston Chronicle found seasoned Austin bureau chief Mike Ward had quoted people who later couldn’t be found, leading to his resignation in September.
Both instances raise questions about how publications factcheck themselves, a practice that some journalists doubt would prevent the misdeeds of a skilled fabulist.
Reporters who fabricate have a few things in common. First, they know their industry well, and they use that knowledge to game the system. According to “Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech” by Craig Silverman, former reporter Stephen Glass, who fabricated entire stories, wrote fake notes to dodge factcheckers at The New Republic. Der Spiegel factchecks all of its stories, but that didn’t stop Relotius, either.
Another common factor is that fabricated quotes have a certain knack for inserting editorial opinions into supposed straight-news stories. When the Chronicle found that quotes from problematic sources directly influenced the angle of eight stories by Ward, the newspaper retracted them.
In 2002, The Associated Press fired justice department reporter Christopher Newton for using spurious sources. Like Ward, Newton at times wrote opinions into fabricated quotes that strengthened the claims in a story. In a story about legislation crafted to make filing for bankruptcy more difficult, Newton put the following words in the mouth of a fictitious credit company lobbyist: “There are people who are just irresponsible, and it is time we started making them pay for that.”
At Der Spiegel, Relotius became a master at this. His work relied on stereotypical figures, some based on real people and others not, and bogus details with molecular specificity to set the tone of his stories. In 2017, his story about Trump Country began on a road into a rural town, where Relotius dreamed up a handmade sign posted with the warning, “Mexicans Keep Out.”
Several sources for this story in Big If True described reporter fabrication as pathological and aberrant behavior. Relotius seems to agree. Having told Der Spiegel that something was wrong with him, he said, “I’m sick and I need to get help.”
In a political environment rife with anti-media sentiment, some worry the actions of reporters like Ward will make the public doubt journalists’ veracity.
“If you look at how rare these types of cases are, that should be an indication of the integrity of 99.5 percent of all journalists,” said Kathleen McElroy, director of the Moody School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and former associate managing editor of The New York Times. “I guess what I’m saying is right now we don’t need the equivalent of a body cam for journalists.”
It seems logical that internal factchecking would be the best way to prevent fabrication or plagiarism. However, given how skillfully Relotius and Glass evaded factcheckers, editors like PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan doubt factchecking could help.
“From a daily newspaper perspective, it’s hard to catch unless you’re doing some kind of routine audit of your reporters’ work,” she said.
Still, at least in Relotius’ case, there were enough red flags that a co-worker raised concerns about the star reporter, concerns that were initially rejected.
In his Trump Country story, Relotius wrote that the city administrator for Fergus Falls, Minnesota wore a gun to work, hated the idea of a woman president and had never been to the ocean before, all of which were lies. The strangest of them all was the claim that the gun-toting, woman-hating public servant liked warm beer, which conservatives and liberals can agree is downright un-American.
American journalists didn’t start factchecking themselves until the 1920s, when major magazines created female-only factchecking departments. The practice was no longer considered “women’s work” by the mid to late 1990s, but magazines like Newsweek were beginning to shut down their factchecking departments. National magazines, including The New Yorker, still have factcheckers on staff, but what the industry does as a whole isn’t widely known.
Because it takes place behind closed doors and also because of its relative rarity, internal factchecking takes on a mystique. In “Regret the Error,” first published in 2007, everyone who Silverman spoke to factchecked using a physical paper copy of a story. “Apart from that,” he wrote, “systems vary, and I discovered that not everyone likes to share.”
They don’t. Of the 13 journalists and media organizations contacted for this story, only two agreed to discuss their factchecking system on the record. Those who didn’t respond to interview requests include Nancy Barnes, National Public Radio’s senior vice president of news who served as Houston Chronicle’s executive editor when Ward was fired, and Chronicle interim executive editor Steve Riley.
Ward worked at the Austin American-Statesman for most of his career, and in December, Statesman managing editor John Bridges also declined to comment for this story, citing an ongoing outside review of Ward’s work at the paper.
It’s fair to say that daily newspapers have never had a cross-industry standard for factchecking themselves. If there is an overarching approach, it’s that editors tend to “spot” factcheck, looking further into information that seems off or is obviously wrong.
The New Yorker has said that its factcheckers check names and dates, try to speak to each person mentioned in a story and review tapes and transcripts from interviews to verify quotes. Most publications don’t have the resources, though, to hire a team of factcheckers.
So, at The Jackson Free Press, an alt-weekly in Mississippi, reporters factcheck each other. They print out each story, along with background materials, and indicate where each fact came from, then another reporter goes over them, one by one. They also call sources to verify the facts within quotes and sometimes check recordings to doublecheck quotes themselves.
Free Press CEO and editor Donna Ladd hasn’t encountered a writer making up sources, but her system exposed an instance of plagiarism. Asked how she’d address skeptics who would find the system a waste of time and resources, Ladd’s response was simple: the process catches errors in most stories.
“That’s kind of the bottom line, … which to me proves the need to have the system,” she said.
UT’s McElroy wasn’t his editor at the time, but she was a New York Times editor when Jayson Blair resigned after plagiarizing stories and fabricating facts. She said that at the time, editorial staff reviewed a typical story four times before publication. Before she left the paper in 2011, the level of factchecking a story received depended on the piece, but also the editor and the copyeditor reviewing it, with some staff members working to verify every fact if they had the time.
McElroy’s approach depended on the story, but she tended to factcheck information that raised her eyebrows.
“An editor has to trust his or her reporter, especially at the daily journalism level,” McElroy said. “Magazines can try to factcheck a story to an inch of its life, but that’s just not possible in daily journalism.”
PolitiFact doesn’t have a formal internal factchecking system, Holan said, but reporters turn in source lists for their stories.
“I should be able to reproduce their findings,” she said. “I think a lot of young reporters have accuracy issues because they’re learning the craft, … but one of the things I do is tell them to print their story and doublecheck every factual statement, name and number, and check it with a red checkmark.”
The payoff, Holan said, is you can sleep at night.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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