#JOURNALISM: The youthful fabulists: Stephen Glass vs. Claas Relotius.

Perhaps you’ve heard of German journalist Claas Relotius. He wrote for the German periodical Der Spiegel and and had won “numerous awards such as CNN’s Journalist of the Year and Germany’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.” I guess you’d say he qualified for the adjective “renowned.”

Well, now he’s renowned for another reason—he’s been revealed as a fabulist on the order of Stephen Glass, who wrote fake stories for The New Republic and was finally exposed and disgraced, but not until after he’d been hailed as a journalistic wunderkind. That was about twenty years ago, and although there are similarities in their stories and methods, there are differences that reflect how far journalism has fallen in those intervening twenty years.

For example, although Glass made up many articles out of the whole cloth, he was aware of TNR’s fairly rigorous fact-checking of the time and created an elaborate back-story for each article to fool the fact-checkers. . . .

But Relotius didn’t have to work that hard to fool his magazine. Fact-checking of the type that had existed at TNR back in the 90s, when Glass was operating, could be thwarted for a significant amount of time—as Glass’s successful capers proved—but it was difficult to do. For Relotius, however, evading the “world’s largest fact-checking organization” run by Der Spiegel was a relative piece of cake.

How could that be? Well, largest doesn’t equal best.

Especially when the narrative is one they want to push.