"The case of Claas Relotius, Der Spiegel and the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota has become notorious.
Der Spiegel, Europe’s most widely-read news source, fired Relotius, one of Germany’s most honored journalists, when it came to light that he had made up facts in a number of articles he wrote for the magazine.
...In an article Wednesday, Der Spiegel wrote that Mr. Relotius “distorts reality” in the article about Fergus Falls. A spokesman for the magazine said that Der Spiegel’s fact-checking process “does not include contacting any subjects of articles,” adding that the department reviews each story sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility, followed by a review between the department and the story’s author.
I think that last observation comes close to the heart of the matter.
Stories are reviewed “sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility.”
What is going on here is not fact-checking, but plausibility-checking.
Is it surprising that the editors at Der Spiegel found Relotius’s absurd smears against the people of Fergus Falls to be plausible?
No.
Bias reinforced bias, bigotry confirmed bigotry.
This phenomenon is not restricted to the European press.
Here in the U.S., we have seen many instances where news outlets like CNN have reported “facts” that were entirely fabricated.
Those “facts” likewise passed the test of plausibility–that is, they tended to make Donald Trump and his supporters look bad.
This is, I think, one of the key mechanisms through which leftist bias is institutionalized, and the press repeatedly embarrasses itself by printing falsehoods.
The sobering question is, of all the falsehoods printed in the “mainstream” press, what percentage do you think are ever publicly exposed?"
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