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Originally posted by BansheeOne:

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Originally posted by JD83:
Excellent take on the Der Spiegel reporter and his ilk:

"Whatever one wants to say for the old model of the journalism career, there was a winnowing process to filter out the extremely stupid and dishonest. The Der Spiegel scandal is mostly due to hiring a charismatic greenhorn into a prominent position, without having put him through an apprenticeship. Odds are, the people who hired him had never been local reporters or had to edit copy for a small publication. Like Claas Relotius, they popped out of good schools and the right families into elite media."

More about his ilk in :"Industrial Rumpswabbery" at the Zman here

I don't think family or school background played a role here. Relotius studied political and cultural sciences in Bremen and Valencia, interned for a month with the Berlin-based daily "tageszeitung" (politically affiliated with the Greens) in 2008, got an MA from the Hamburg Media School in 2011 and started writing as a freelancer for various German and Swiss print media across the political board. Nothing prior to him being hired by "Spiegel" in 2017 as a regular editor really says "elite", like if he had gone to the Henri Nannen School, also in Hamburg, which is run by two of Germany's top publishers and sponsored by the "Spiegel" itself, having produced many high-profile journalists and editors-in-chief.

I think there are two larger underlying problems shown by the case. One is editors believing in narratives conforming to their personal bias; which is true for any political camp, actually. The other being the trend towards "storytelling" in journalism. The latter is currently being discussed more than the former in German journalistic circles, including "Spiegel" itself (their initial report on the affair has been criticized as falling into the same trap, being a quasi-literary treatment more at the expense of the individual culprit than the magazine). This guy was heaped with praise (and prizes) for his eloquent style, which seems to have impressed people so much they didn't bother so much with the facts - of course also because those tended to satisfy their bias. But then it's easier to debate the former than the latter.

Of course now people show up who claim they always thought his stories were just too perfect, too smooth, too detailed. The only one who can command real credibility about this though is Juan Moreno, the colleague who exposed him. In his personal depiction, he said he once read a Relotius article years ago before either of them worked for "Spiegel", which portrayed the supposedly first professional tax consultant on Cuba; allegedly shoeshiners were lining up for advice from him. Per Moreno, he thought "so Cuban shoeshiners make enough money to have questions about their tax performance. Right." But of course he couldn't be sure that never happens either, so rather than accusing an acclaimed colleague on a shaky basis, he kept his mouth shut when they later worked for "Spiegel".

Moreno allows that he probably only kept his reserve because he never actually met Relotius, who was employed as a regular editor at the "Spiegel" headquarters in Hamburg while he was working as a stringer in Berlin; they talked once on the phone over a contribution by Moreno, and were in the same room at Christmas parties, but didn't get personally acquainted. By all accounts, like all the most successful imposters, Relotius seems to be a guy who is great at making any people he meets like him, even in the shark bassin that is top-level journalism. Colleagues subsequently told Moreno he was the only one they didn't begrudge his awards, that they'd rather believed their own mother was faking reports than him, that he was always the most critical about his own work, etc.

In the end, everybody likes to read a good story for the sake of itself; Relotius' portrayal of the US border vigilante group that Moreno got suspicious over included nice human touches like that one member had had his daughter hooked upon drugs by South American immigrants. With his imagination, attention to detail and writing skills, he would probably make a good and successful novelist - but entertainment should not be a journalist's job, and it is being pointed out now (again) that the lines have become dangerously blurred.

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Originally posted by JD83:
Don’t know if you are particularly interested in these subjects but I’m very much so, especially with the Occupation, as my family was so intertwined with it. If you are also fascinated with this, you may find the minutiae below interesting, as some of it pertains to Berlin during the Cold War-and also occupied Germany.

(I don’t know why there isn’t a good popular history book about the occupation written by an excellent historian like Rick Atkinson(who was born in Munich at the tail end of the Occupation where his dad was stationed). The most recent English language book about it, written by Susan Carruthers, also addresses the occupation of Japan, about which there’s already some pretty good books(in her defense, she cites my article about the theft of the Hesse Crown Jewels-which happened in the early years of the Occupation- in her bibliography. The article can be found here

Anyway, after visiting(again)the usual tourist sights in Berlin, I spent a day tracking down these Cold War sights:

This house, off ClayAllee, was originally owned by Hitler’s Keitel, who had some underground rooms(bomb shelters?)and passageways built into it-which made it the perfect place for the
operations headquarters of the U.S. Military Liaison Mission(USMLM), which it shared at various times with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency(now it houses a chiropractor’s office: