People were right in the previous discussion [0] to criticize Der Spiegel's self-serving sanctimonious tone in their writeup of the scandal. It's impossible to read the allegations by the Fergus Falls residents here and square them with Der Spiegel's purportedly high-performing fact-checking operation. It's not just only that they failed to detect their reporter's malicious deception. But they failed to do the most basic kind of fact-checking. For instance, I could see them failing to get to the bottom of an ephemeral fact like whether someone had put up a sign saying "Mexicans Keep Out". But calling the city to confirm that the official city sign says "Home of Damn Good Folks", and the theater to confirm that they were playing "American Sniper" in 2017? Those are the kind of facts that at a bare minimum professional fact-checkers should be double-checking.
Even something like the claim that the city administrator was a gun-toting virgin is something that a fact-checker is expected to call and independently confirm. And even if the guy gives a non-committal denial, e.g. "That's ridiculous, I don't want have anything to do with your left-wing fake news article!", the fact-checker should be prying the reporter for all the documentation/notes that support the claim. In fact, in this scenario, the fact-checker should be highly suspicious that the city official is so standoffish, if the reporter managed to gain his trust enough in the first place to reveal that he's a virgin (and is ostensibly embarrassed about it).
Der Spiegel has a lot of questions it has to answer for how it failed so thoroughly for so many years here.
Most workplaces operate on a high amount of trust though, especially in Western Europe. If you’ve achieved star-reporter status at der Spiegel, as such that you’re sent 3 weeks to America to do investigative journalism, it goes to reason, that you also meet a high amount of trust. So I think it’s easy to see how the editorial staff might have missed the problem.
I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, we do a lot of internal reviewing of employee behaviour. When things go wrong, it’s possible to steal 111 million danish kroner after all[0]. Despite our best efforts, things still do go wrong though, and that’s because, even in the heart of bureaucracy, we still rely on trust, and when people intentionally abuse it, shit happens.
It’s unfortunate, but things aren’t perfect. Everyone is pressed for financial resources and then everything from financial security to editorial journalism becomes patch-work “good enough” type systems. Because the perfect system simply doesn’t exist. One of my user accounts has a lot of privileges for instance, more than it rightly should. It’s like that because I need access to so many different things, that our IT-department would need a half-time hire if they were to keep my user rights for our 500 different IT systems up to speed. It’s an imperfect solution that only works as long as I don’t misbehave, and while we do a lot of internal reviewing, the truth is I could abuse those rights.
At least Der Spiegel fired the fraudster when they found out.
If we are relying on a system of trust then it is important that overseeing bodies are unbiased and unconnected to those those they oversee. More often than not, a failure in a trust model happens because of a unseen relationship that biased the overseeing body to either miss the problem, ignore the problem, or explicitly being blocked from doing anything about it.
I would like to ask what caused der spiegel system to fail, and I would guess that given the context of this article with the 2016 election and trump, a portrait of rural America that is this extreme would have raised alarm bells if their internal fact checking group had a more diverse mix of political views. The story is way to clean and fit too nicely the political narrative that now in the after match it seems almost silly.
The fact that European readers even believed half of the fabrications in this story is telling of how ignorant they really are about the USA.
Just because you have seen movies which are the product of LA and NYC doesn't mean you know anything about the USA. Let me be clear: people in NYC and LA themselves know nothing of their country. This is blatantly obvious when you watch ANY Hollywood creation set in rural America.
It is frustrating to deal with self righteous assumptions of my culture like this based on movies and TV shows.
I have had a bunch of experiences in Europe where I get told what’s wrong with America. I like how America is so self critical and wants to improve itself. But most of these Europeans have no idea what they’re talking about. I had a Brit tell me how sickened he was that 40% of Americans were Christians that literally only support Israel in order to create a holy land that will survive the apocalypse. He was so convinced that when I returned home I asked my religious friends what they thought. I can’t find a single person who believes anything remotely close to that. And definitely not a part of the calculus for supporting Israel.
The strange thing is, that plenty of actors and writers in NYC and LA are from the south and Midwest. They could easily (and probably do) write scripts that accurately portray the "flyover states".
But accuracy is not what sells movies and the powers that be seem quite set in their opinions that the innacurate, stereotypical views they hold are what people want to see.
I agree, and journalism is definitely a profession that is reliant on trust. A reporter can get all the facts correct but still be completely wrong in judging their importance or interpretation. But that doesn't mean fact-checkers can't catch them when they are materially wrong about confirmable facts. Presumably, if a reporter completely misread/fabricated what a town's sign said, then they likely misjudged/fabricated the basis for describing the town as being close-minded and ignorant.
As a personal anecdote, the only time I've ever been published in the New York Times was in the NYT Magazine. A staffer had seen a comment I posted on HN (in a HN thread about a NYTM article) and asked if it'd be OK to print it as a letter to the editor. When I agreed, I had to email back and forth with a fact-checker for a couple of days to clarify the content of my HN comment -- she even went so far as to point out, to my embarrassment, how I had misremembered the plot of "Dumb and Dumber". If they put in that much time for a letter to the editor, I imagine that their actual staffer articles put under the same amount of scrutiny.
> If you’ve achieved star-reporter status at der Spiegel, as such that you’re sent 3 weeks to America to do investigative journalism, it goes to reason, that you also meet a high amount of trust
Every place I've worked at for the last decade expected that everyone would have a vod ed review before merging. Not because they didn't trust us, either, but because the risk is high.
I can accept your argument as "what happened", but not that it was a reasonable result.
I am not trolling. But seriously, I doubt that the Spiegel has any "fact checking" that deserves the name. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that the Spiegel has some serious "opinion policing". It was once a news magazine run by journalists. Now it is more or less a political voice for the guy who inherited the majority of the shares. I would not call it a news magazine anymore, nor would I call it serious journalism. The guy delivered just what he was supposed to deliver. His messages fitted so undeliverable well in what they wanted to hear and communicate.
Today Spiegel would call this "hate speech". The declining sales numbers are not surprising. In history, propaganda was free. You pay for journalism but who is going to pay for propaganda?
I don't have any reason to doubt you about the direction Spiegel has taken and based on other stories in the past few years I'm not a fan. But this story you've cited --- maybe it loses something in the Google translation? --- is pretty gross.
Can I ask what exactly is gross about it? I didn't read the article in full, but did skim through it for a few minutes, and it seems to me its only "crime" is not being politically correct by the modern standards of today. But I question whether or not that's truly a bad thing. Are journalists only allowed to write positively about immigrants and refugees or any other group that is considered "underprivileged", while hiding anything remotely negative?
It could be argued that that in itself is gross. Is that the standard of freedom of speech and freedom of the press that we should be striving for?
You can write a story about the pitfalls of immigration
--- though, recall, this story was written in 1973, and the ensuing years were not exactly a calamity for Germany.
But you can't write a non-gross story about the proclivity of immigrants to "multiply" once arrived. Nor is "look at all these Turkish immigrants with all their Turkish ways" a real look at the impact of immigration.
I'm curious, now, where did 'jayalpha even find this nasty piece of writing?
"I'm curious, now, where did 'jayalpha even find this nasty piece of writing?"
I looked for another one from Spiegel. "X Million Turkish people are already here, X Million more want to come" but could not find it anymore. This was the first google hit that showed up for my search.
"Are journalists only allowed to write positively about immigrants and refugees or any other group that is considered "underprivileged", while hiding anything remotely negative?"
If you work for "Der Spiegel", the answer is defiantly yes.
Could some of the situation be due to differences between German and American conceptions and assumptions about journalism? I mean on a nuanced level; obviously German journalists don't think they should publish falsehoods. Purely as examples of differences that could have an impact: Maybe fact-checking is more the responsibility of the journalist; maybe 'news' is perceived more the way American journalism perceives opinion pieces, with their accompanying lower standards of accuracy (something I still don't understand - outright deception is commonly accepted in opinion pieces, in the most serious publications). It would be a mistake to assume all journalism is conceived of and operates in the same way, in all countries.
Also, Der Spiegel has long had an extraordinary reputation; my impression is that, of publications outside English-speaking countries, Der Spiegel has the best reputation among Americans. I'm not sure that many do their own evaluation, though Der Speigel looks like what we expect serious journalism to look like. Taking a longer view than just this immediate problem, do they deserve the reputation? If not, I'd be interested in who others recommend (outside English-speaking countries).
To be honest, I was quite surprised because I heard that Der Spiegel has an „extraordinary reputation“ in the U.S. for the first time today on HN.
I am German and even when I went to school (before the „life-sucking Internet“ from a comment below) there was the saying that all you could trust in Der Spiegel are the dates and numbers (although this article suggests even that might be too much).
IMHO, there are much better German-language news sources out there (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Brand Eins, to name just a few with differing political leanings).
I think in the Netherlands we generally look at Der Spiegel also as a respectable publication. The Dutch Wikipedia entry on it calls Der Spiegel a "moral authority", among other things.
Fact-checking isn't just about dates and numbers, but about all facts presented in an article.
As a German I'm also surprised about that reputation. The Spiegel is somewhere between a serious newspaper (like FAZ, Süddeutsche or Zeit) and a tabloid (like Bild). Hunting for great headlines and stories, but not necessarily concerned with objective news reporting.
It's funny, because the Spiegel is a weekly magazine and the NYT a daily newspaper, which brings a lot of difference in the style of the articles. Th best German comparison to the NYT is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) oder Süddeutsche (SZ).
Honesty is considered one of the highest of virtues in Germany. You can be blunt to the point of rudeness and people will still praise you for being "plainspoken". And talking about plagiarism: at least two federal ministers have had to resign in the last 10 years after it came out that they plagiarised parts of their PhD theses. Though obviously not all Germans are honest, honesty does has a very high standing in our culture. There is no excuse whatsoever for this kind of deliberate forgery, especially by a member of a profession whose job it is to "tell the truth".
You're going to have to call someone to confirm, including whichever random tourist took the photo you found on Google Images, why not get it straight from the horse's mouth?
I think the point is that even a minimal amount of digging into the facts behind this story would have raised a few red flags. It obviously wasn't vetted at all.
I’m fairly convinced it’s not remotely limited to Der Spiegel. If primary sources aren’t cited in downloadable attachments, it’s just best to assume the thing is a pure work of fiction.
I have absolutely zero respect for “journalism” at this time. It is, as far as I’m concerned, an entirely dead art, all life sucked from it by the great destroyer we call the Internet.
This network we created, and in particular most of the shiny things at L7, is not healthy for even an above average psyche. It attenuates all feedback loops that our bodies require to form empathy, while amplifying the worst parts of us through appeals to fame, fortune, and notoriety.
I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the construct that he didn’t even have a chance, the better.
I'm inclined to agree and the sad part is, journalism is an essential NGO organ of civil society.
The 4th Estate is a very important thing for us all.
Watching Cable News these days is crazy because you can watch journalists, spin, lie and misrepresent ... but at the very same time they are presenting facts that do matter.
Go take a look at 'waybackmacine' and click some links from even 10 years go - the news was not nearly as crazy and clickbaity.
I truly hope that things can settle down a bit maybe in the next political cycle.
Finally - I should say that almost all MSM left and right completely misrepresent middle America. The reality in Cleveland, rural Ohio, Utah, Houston, Alabama ... it's just not anywhere to be found on the news unless something terrible that happens where the press wants to use that piece of information to construct a narrative.
Edit: I should add that there is a very real financial pressure right now for journos - newspapapers are falling apart everywhere, this is a real thing. Individual journos are not natural capitalists. We used to pay for the news we don't now, and we still haven't figured out a model. This is a major factor.
I'd be interested to hear how you describe the current situation in Cleveland. I just finished my first semester at a school nearby but spent no time in Cleveland aside from the airport, so even though I've been nearby, I really haven't been exposed.
I currently live in Canada and get the local news from Vermont. It's sublime and cathartic: local girls basketball team highlights. Interviews with part-time stat reps who also run the local store. No clickbait language between state reps, governor etc.. No culture war.
The national news is a circus, with each clown playing a part. It's ideological, clickbait, narrative-driven and parsed to remove anything that could upset corporate sponsors.
Blaming the internet is absolutely unfair. Before, it was really hard to expose bad journalism, that's the foundation of the myth about times of good journalism.
Duranty was awarded with Pulitzer for blatant lies in the first half of XX century, and it took more than 60 years for this to be widely revealed. It wouldn't be that easy for him nowadays.
The Internet has at the very least not bettered the conditions for journalism because the advantages it brought are completely drowned out by new mechanism of consumption and its subsequent fights for readers.
It changed conditions for media business as much as for many other industries, making things economically worse for some and better for others. It didn't make journalism worse, for sure.
Media has been always flourishing on sensationalism, propaganda, pushing somebody's interests, and manipulating social strivings. And I mean it - it happened to me to talk to a historian who worked with first European newspapers which appeared soon after press (as a mechanism) became a common thing - most of them were exactly like modern clickbaity news, it's just that it was easier to amuse a reader back then, so their sensations look a bit naïve by modern standards. You can re-read Mark Twain for very recognizable patterns of political reporting of later times, then came mafia influence, revolutionary preachers, liars, and useful idiots. Bribery, business interests, gov't intrusions, political biases. And then internet appeared, and broke the beauty of journalism :-) The phenomenon of US press as being generally useful as whole (compared to USSR, or eve Europe) is because of its diversity - ensured by freedom of speech - call it a really big choice of distortions. And the internet made this choice even wider, actually. "Good journalism" which is impartial, and correct, and truth-loving is a romantic myth, and always been.
I see it as an arms race. Your previous approach, “blind trust” stopped working because it has been exploited. Now you need to take a sample of facts to check to decide which journalists can be trusted.
That can be exploited too, but the exploit won’t be necessary until that sampling process is automated and widespread. At that point you will need to escalate further.
But your alternative—believe nothing you read—is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you stop reading nonfiction you will be seriously hampering your ability to compete.
That was around way before the internet, before radio even. The printing press has been used to spread outright works of fiction as reality. To be frank it is more a human nature thing.
unfortunately too many journalists have demoted themselves to "copywriters based on things you find online", whatever the things are. I m frankly not surprised this guy ended up writing fiction: when you only look at the world through a glass, it stops being real to you.
it is becoming almost impossible to find eyewitness journalists. OTOH, connected journalism can only be useful in extraordinary cases that can be verified via online channels or which involve anonymity (E.g. snowden case)
Is that the natural endgame of journalism? who knows
They have become narrative creators. They create a number of narratives, and people attach to the one that fits their preconceptions. Reality doesn't matter that much.
> I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the construct that he didn’t even have a chance, the better.
It makes no sense to blame a game, that always seemed like an even shittier variant of "just following orders" to me. A game only exists because people play it, and only for so long as they do. It doesn't have agency, or consciousness, or responsibility, or anything. Let's say I "blame the game". Okay, then what? What does that even mean? The "game" is an abstract idea, so how do I punish it, how do I reason with it, how do I anything at all with it? I can't, so I don't.
In the same way that most actual games won't let a player declare victory by fiat whenever they want, people in a social system (like "journalism" or "politics" or an open-source software project) can't always do the right thing, even if they want to. Economic constraints, or opportunity costs, or the time required to establish consensus all put limits on what people can do, and often require people to do nothing, or even negative things (like writing clickbait articles or supporting unpopular policies) so they'll have more resources to pour into the positive things they really care about later.
"blaming the game" in this context means understanding that such constraints exist, and as for "then what": work to change the economics of that situation. Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism, educate yourself on political issues and educate your friends so fewer voters will be swayed by populist rhetoric, volunteer to do some menial task so resources can be put towards longer-term goals.
People interacting with other people. Which is why good things to do are, as you said
> Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism, educate yourself on political issues and educate your friends so fewer voters will be swayed by populist rhetoric, volunteer to do some menial task so resources can be put towards longer-term goals.
because that's kinda interacting as a molecule, with the other molecules of the social system -- not "the body as a whole", which is more an idea than anything one could do in practice.
> Economic constraints, or opportunity costs, or the time required to establish consensus all put limits on what people can do, and often require people to do nothing, or even negative things
That's absolutely not the case for Relotius. Jörg Thadeusz is actually pretty pissed off at those excuses, he says they need to end and I agree.
For every excuse, you can often find dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of people who are in the same or worse situation as the excusee, but have not resorted to what they're excusing.
"Don't blame the game, blame the player" seems an apt summary of the TV series, "The Wire", in which cops and drug dealers and teachers and politicians are seen as being cyclically screwed by systemic failure.
So "blaming the game" ostensibly says that we should focus on fixing the system, and not blaming its individual "players" who are incentivized or even forced to fail/act wrongly. I'm sure you're aware that every professional sport has had in its history a number of rule changes to make the game safer or more well-run, and these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.
> So "blaming the game" ostensibly says that we should focus on fixing the system,
Which is people interacting with people, and calling some of that "system". I asked, now what, what does it mean in practice... actually unpack these abstractions, and think through what those abstract words mean in practive step by step: it's all just people dealing with people. When the rules in a sport change, that means people discuss with others, maybe write stuff down, then referees learn their job based on those agreements, and actively enforce the rules.
> these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.
That's like saying a beach has more of a systemic effect than the grains of sands it consists of. When "the rules get changed", that boils down to nothing but interaction between rule committees (or whatever the mechanism may be), refs, players and coaches.
This is exactly right. And this decay is in no small part responsible for the lunatic, polarized times we live in. It is impossible to come together if we do even have shared facts to reason with.
These forms of schmalz the journalist at hand fed his employer also fed into a cherished world-view. Cherished by co-workers and by the dozens or so jurors and organizations that plastered him with awards. All of this happened before the dominance of internet in German journalism as well. But most importantly, you don't need the internet present for those things to happen. What you need is a deep bias.
e.g. at Der Spiegel
- a left-leaning political stance is commonly held; in 1987 they in a successful attempt to derail the campaign of an conservative politician, stirred up what became to be known as the Barschel-Affair [1]. It ended with the suicide of the conservative politician and the social democratic successor stepping down a couple of years later, when in the affair's aftermath his own corrupt doings were laid bare.
- From 2000-2007, when the "national socialist underground" committed their serial-killings against immigrants (and a police officer) Der Spiegel was at the forefront portraying them as "Döner-Murders"; that the killings were all part of the inner workings of the Turkish mafia.
- an "Israel critical" stance is somewhat commonly held; in 2010 you could get away with articles with complete made up facts about orthodox jews in Jerusalem (hint: bad people that don't use cell-phones etc.) [2]
- In 2016 a court ordered Der Spiegel to redact 14 claims it made against an investigative journalist [3] and subsequently agreed to redact the whole piece.
- In 2018 at another publication, Die Zeit, in a prime example of biasedness, its editors-in-chief publicly smeared one of their own inhouse journalists after she in one of her articles dared to pose the question whether the NGOs cruising the Mediterranean Sea to rescue refugees were always helpful or whether they might increase the human toll after all (since smugglers counting on those NGOs to pick up "their slack" started to massively lower the quality of vessels used to transport the refugees) [4]
It is absurd to describe rhe magazines political stance as „left leaning“. If anything, It is neoliberal. It had destroyed the campaigns of left leaning politicians at least as as those of conservatives.
I’m sorry to tell you, „left leaning“ is not something you define, but rather something that gets being „left“ by comparison of what is considered the opposite of left.
In that sense, Spiegel was always left-leaning. Most certainly so, when campaigning against a 1980s conservative.
The latest accusation against him is embezzlement [0]. Also, the Spiegel reporter who tried to unmask Relotius was threatened with a termination of his contract when he talked to supervisors about his findings. [1].
Also in the FAZ, there was a very good commentary on the whole case by one of the publishers [2]. He identifies the same narrative smoke-bombs ("story-telling kitsch") in the Spiegel's writeup of the whole case as in Relotius' original articles.
I came across [2] as well, yesterday, and particularly liked the conclusion:
Slightly improved Google translation:
„One does not write about arguments, ideas and concerns, but about the people who supposedly have them and about how they are, how they look and how they live, where one has met them, how dangerous, or at least exotic it was to meet them at all, and that the wind lashed against the quay wall, when splendor and misery came together at night in the room no. such-and-such. But as long as one writes in such a way, because one thinks in such a way, the case of Relotius will only lead to appeals to conscience and to the condemnation of those without conscience. The underlying issue, the storytelling kitsch, will not change.“
Could've been written about the con in general. I recently read a book about this called The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova [1]. I can highly recommend it.
In USA this is called gonzo journalism, and artistic form that decimated journalism by replacing it with literature that is more fun to read and write but less useful.
You often see complaints about this story-telling kitch here on HNs in response to many long-form articles garnished with many paragraphs of tangential location and people stories.
Besides the obivious lack of oversight on Der Spiegel and ethics of the journalist. I believe that there are a few lessons we can take away here:
1. We value honest hard work. However, we rarely value the people who do it. (The journalist was a "star" journalist and was required to perform at that level constantly.. does this ring a bell to any developers?)
2. Confirmation Bias is rather nasty, and that has been used to propagate some bad narritives. Right now the political deviviness has encouraged by the media. This article: Look at these "racist", "sexist", *ist people in some low-class people in this rural area. At least this is what I get from it. (That's been the garbage tauted by the left)
3. This guy was trusted as a leader way too much. I would not be surprised if he's a psychopath. (He has no concerns over the people he screws over, and the only reason he seems sorry is that he got caught).
As this guy [0] (a TV moderator who handed Relotius several of his awards) says, that journalist was under no economic pressure, at all. And the interviewed person also calls out this worldview in which everybody is a victim, nobody is an actor, and many journalists are more concerned about them being victims than being victimizers.
And it really is telling that the perpetrator so easily gets styled as kind-of-also-a-victim, as if having won a few prizes created this pressure/temptation no human could possibly withstand.
(I started to write my comment in response to someone who replied to you and said you using the word sociopath was "dehumanizing", and that they don't want to defend the journalist, but that "any normal and well adjusted person" could have gotten addicted to having won prizes -- that as well as some comments on the first story about the subject on HN is what I meant with styling them as victim, not your comment as such)
Maybe they were too willing to believe his depiction of small town America as a bunch of poorly educated, bigoted hicks? Perhaps because it confirmed their own biases?
I know it’s a German publication, but this is perhaps a symptom of the monoculture that permeates a lot of organizations in the “West”
When I read news articles about topics with which I am familiar, I encounter plenty of statements that strike me as basically false. Consider this excerpt from the New York Times' piece of Donald Knuth [1]:
> Following Dr. Knuth’s doctrine helps to ward off moronry. He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee.
Calling the idea that code should be readable by humans "almost twee" just makes me think that the writer has no idea what they're talking about. Sure, there are times when people write crap code, but being readable by humans is the whole reason why we built coding languages. Not to mention, the average readability of code has probably increased over time, not decreased. The author is basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation, to the detriment of the credibility of the rest of the article.
It's nowhere near the magnitude of the fabrications in Der Spiegel of course, but it does seem to be the case that writers are willing to trust their own prejudices without fact checking. I was able to spot when those prejudices in the above example but only because I have relevant domain knowledge. It makes me wonder, how many times do I swallow the BS without knowing it? It's just a matter of how small (or big) of a statement they're willing to make without verifying it's veracity.
I immediately thought the same thing. But then I thought, not being a subject matter expert doesn't give you an excuse to write bullshit.
I think people who study the arts are less likely to have experience with and understand complex systems and, because of the different structure of knowlege in a subject like journalism, it's easier to be overconfident in one's knowlege. Especially when extended to topics like physics which require mathematics to truly understand.
And yet a journalist with no tech startup, venture capital, or biomedical experience was able to understand and expose Theranos, which ran its scam right out from Palo Alto and Stanford.
After reading Bad Blood, the exposure had almost failed was it not for Carreyrou's enduring persistence. He met both internal and external pressure to call off his investigation. Not every journalist is cut for that kind of pressure.
That's not what GP is complaining about - rather, the issue is that the article misrepresents what literate programming is, and makes it sound like nobody writes code for humans to read these days, which is obviously false.
In my decades of programming experience in the commercial sector, I have seen very little readable code. Rush to market and insecure competitive "anyone as smart as me would understand my code" is standard.
> Calling the idea that code should be readable by humans "almost twee" just makes me think that the writer has no idea what they're talking about.
This is a strange criticism, and ironically it seems to reveal your own misconception of what "literate programming" actually is. Setting aside the discussion of how languages and design philosophies make tradeoffs that affect readability, Knuth's particular brand of "literate programming" pushes a concept that is orthogonal to language design, and substantially different than the precepts of style and commenting practices offered by things like PEP8. "Literate Programming". From Knuth's homepage [0]:
> The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
From the literateprogramming.com page that Knuth's homepage links to, an excerpt from Ross Williams:
> Instead of writing code containing documentation, the literate programmer writes documentation containing code. No longer does the English commentary injected into a program have to be hidden in comment delimiters at the top of the file, or under procedure headings, or at the end of lines. Instead, it is wrenched into the daylight and made the main focus.
"Literate programming" is not just about readable code, it's about fundamentally restructuring the entire program to be read as one would read a work of literature. And this is something that is not at all standard practice, nor a philosophy that everyone agrees to even be ideal in theory. Here's Peter Norvig's criticism [2]:
> I think the problem with Literate Programming is that assumes there is a single best order of presentation of the explanation. I agree that the order imposed by the compiler is not always best, but different readers have different purposes. You don’t read documentation like a novel, cover to cover. You read the parts that you need for the task(s) you want to do now. What would be ideal is a tool to help construct such paths for each reader, just-in-time; not a tool that makes the author choose a single pth for all readers.
So saying Knuth's philosophy of "literate programming" is "twee" is not at all inaccurate. The sentence structure from the NYT article could be rejiggered so that it's clearer that "twee" refers to Knuth's philosophy, and not "code that is readable by humans" in general. But the author is absolutely right to describe Knuth as being a pioneer in literate programming, and that it's a paradigm not followed in practice by mainstream software development.
Yes, but as you said in your last paragraph, the main issue is that the sentence is very misleading. I don't know if the author knew what they were talking about, but taken at face value, it does sound very wrong.
The sentence is more correct than it is wrong. Here it is with the context of its paragraph:
> He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee. Dr. Knuth has gone so far as to argue that some computer programs are, like Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” works of literature worthy of a Pulitzer.
Note this part specifically:
> the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance...a notion that nowadays seems almost twee"
"literate programming" is the notion emphasizing* the "importance" of writing code readable by humans. And this "notion" The word "which" would make it even clearer that the subject of the clause is "literate programming", but the sentence is still grammatically correct as is. Everyone thinks it's important for code to be readable, but Knuth is the one who is radical about how important it is -- to the point that he thinks programs should be "literature worthy of a Pulitzer".
In any case, the NYT author is more accurate than the previous HN commenter, who seems to have jumped to a conclusion without knowing anything about the concept "literate programming", or how and why Knuth is known for it. The NYT author is not "basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation", but it seems the commenter is not as familiar with Knuth and/or computer programming as he thinks he is.
I live in Germany and the story of the liar journalist fascinates me. There are multiple things at play here, that man did similar things with Syrian kids etc.
Ultimately the reason why he did it is because he could and I blame the nonexistent fact checking at Spiegel for this. But on a more personal level Relotius said he couldn’t stand the pressure of not delivering a great story (he won multiple awards first). I would also blame these awards for beeing to trusting, somebody like him should never have reached this level of fame and reputation.
I never really read his stuff, but I remember reading one story a long time ago that had someone start singing a song and I remembered wondering if this really happended or if I am in the realm of phantasy there. Now I know.
As a German living in Hamburg, where three of the main German publications (Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Der Stern) are produced (and Die Bild as well as Die Welt were also until recently), having worked with as well as being friends with a lot of people working there, I can assure you: it's not just incentives for the author, but also incentives for other people in the news organization(s) at work here.
The author's completely made up stories about, e.g. ...
- an American women who is traveling the whole country voluntarily, so that the quorum of one person being present at an execution for it to happen is met
- an innocent Syrian boy who thinks he caused the civil war
- an American town at the Mexican border, that is openly racist and full of dumb backwater, redneck folk
... feed into a commonly shared narrative. Those kind of elegantly written stories serve to immortalize these world-views held by many working at those companies.
Veterans of Der Spiegel were quick to point out, that in their days of working there, it would have been impossible to get even one of his reports pass the inhouse fact checkers and attribute this current blindsightedness to the rise of constructivism amongst journalists.
A guy on the internet doesn't get constructivism. More news at 11!
Constructivism is, in any of its manifestations, never a normative theory. Rather, it tries to describe how reality or certain concepts come about. Instead of saying that we should discard all notions of truth and try to construct reality/some concept in a certain way, it is a simple acknowledgement that our perception is socially mediated.It, of course, doesn't deny that there are two mushroom heads on the ground but rather it highlights that we view (i.e. construct) them as two mushrooms even though they are part of the same organism
Yes. Constructivism in Journalism refers to constructing the truth (around a narrative).
Two examples:
1) As avid reader of American news, I'm always amazed by their one-sidedness when they report about "success"-stories of the German renewable energies program ("Now This" has multiple videos that if translated to German would come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt). But since their audience is American, usually not fluent in German, it's a cakewalk to "construct the truth" by not write a single sentence about domestic German criticisms of those programs.
2) The right-wing example in Germany would be reporting about violent and raping refugees, without stating that most of the victims are refugees themself and that it is often refugees who help with the investigations etc.
> "Now This" has multiple videos that if translated to German would come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt
“Now This” has nothing that doesn't come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt (or, perhaps more to the point, rehashing press releases from interested parties) in English, so I'm not to surprised you think it would come off that way translated to German.
Then again, if you asked Americans to name a respected news source, “Now This” wouldn't be a frequent response.
Sure, my main point was: If I read about German renewable energy programs in respected US news sources, I seldomly see our domestic criticisms even mentioned there too.
„Now this“ is of course an exaggeration of journalistic constructionism, there are more professional approaches.
It worked so well because it rhymed perfectly with widespread stereotypes about America. It looks like he did this in almost all of his articles. He always wrote a compelling story that just happened to perfectly fit into the worldview of the urban upper middle class in Germany.
Maybe they were too willing to believe his depiction of small town America as a bunch of poorly educated, bigoted hicks?
That’s the part that annoys me most. You want bigoted hick towns? As of twenty years ago, I could have rattled off a half-dozen towns in Indiana that would have qualified (though the author’s pre-conceived image would have been a stretch for even these towns). I can’t believe that in twenty years they’ve all turned into liberal enclaves. But that would have taken more work and research, so pick an innocent town on the map and write your narrative about them instead? And if all places, Minnesota? Of all of small town America, I picture MN as probably most “liberal”, for lack of a better description, though I admit little data.
I dunno, in the end I’m annoyed that the reporter didn’t even do a very good job of faking it, and a small town of what are probably nice folks (“damned good folks”?) took the hit.
You are probably right on the money. And that likely happens with the rest of the mainstream media - the readers/viewers will believe whatever is fed to them because it aligns with their narrative of the world.
You publish it so that the people that believe it - and are currently very angry - can enjoy the confirmation of their bias and roll around in it to great pleasure.
A quick example of this in action. A friend of mine is irrationally partisan when it comes to being a Democrat. The party can do no wrong; all wrongs are ignored, without exception. Hillary Clinton was her unicorn politician that was to change everything bad about the world, she cried for weeks about the election loss. Then she moved on to attacking any of her friends she suspected of supporting Trump. When that wasn't enough to sate the anger and hurt, she moved on to demanding proof of loyalty - proof that you didn't support Trump and did support Hillary (Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein supporters were also evil).
She loves any documentary or media she can get her hands on about lesser educated / poor white people in America (she is a white person, and grew up in poor Appalachia). She loves to make fun of them; these are people she hates. It confirms her existing bias and makes everything feel better by reinforcing what she believes about politics generally and the 2016 election specifically. It gives her a villain group to blame any negative situation on (identity politics practically requires groups to designate as evil or bad, to properly establish the framework).
believe me, the liberals and progressives I work with in the tech industry are just as bigoted if not worse than anyone I met growing up in the midwest. They outright dehumanize the "other" ie conservatives with complete blindness to the hypocrisy.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but mobs of liberal activists assaulted Trump supporters in San Jose after a rally.
Trump is openly supportive of LGBTQIA+++ people, was the first Republican presidential nominee to be, and was supportive of them long before Hillary and Obama were.
Healthcare does not automatically equate to socialized healthcare, and it is ignorant and arrogant to make a blanket characterization that voting for a Republican is a vote against "healthcare", whatever that's supposed to mean.
You're running off on tangential points about absolutely nothing. Your original point was that your professional colleagues were bigoted against white conservatives. Now you're talking about politically-motivated violence in general and your critique of the courts and the mainstream media.
Did you get everything off of your chest yet? Did you or your alternate account have any other grievances that you wanted list?
Kinda offtopic: I find it interesting and a little bit disturbing to read "Der Spiegel". "Der" is the German male form of "the" and the Spiegel uses it in the title like "The New York Times".
For me as a German the comments here read like: A "The New York Times" article stated... which is odd, everyone usually drops the "the", if it doesn't fit.
We also change the "der" in German newspapers. E.g. "at the Spiegel" "bei dem Spiegel" or "in an article of the Spiegel" "in einem Bericht des Spiegels".
My impression from that interview is that the fact checkers are not doing things like calling movies theaters, mayors, or owners of restaurants and verifying the statements they allegedly made in their interviews with the reporter are true. Instead they are cross referencing claims made by their reporters, things like whether or not a politician has been quoted in a reputable newspaper as saying something, or how many jobs were created in a time period, with their database of open source intelligence. Is it expected that a fact checker contact everyone a journalist interviewed and go over each sentence and claim line by line and verify that it is true?
> Is it expected that a fact checker contact everyone a journalist interviewed and go over each sentence and claim line by line and verify that it is true?
Yes, this is exactly what fact checkers at top newspapers were traditionally paid to do.
I have no idea how many true fact checkers are left, but you described the job precisely.
I was under the impression those were just examples. The article says that the biggest difference from the american model is the timing of consulting with the fact checkers. As far as I understand, in the american model the fact checker is often responsible to verify sources and details, as described in The New Yorker job description:
I would argue that fact checkers should send a copy of the publication to everyone who was interviewed, and should be the first line of contact for "I didn't say that."
It's easy for fact checkers to check many facts while unconsciously developing a predictable pattern that leaves a certain kind of facts routinely unchecked, leaving an opportunity for fakesters.
This is what happened plus personal relationships due to long years of work next to each other. He prepared the stuff ready for the fact checkers the way they liked it. And they believed him because he was a pro.
As somebody who does a lot of writing and used to write news copy, this is a story I've been following for a while. In my mind it's easily the biggest story in journalism this year.
The internet has made everybody a publisher, from your cousin who thinks Elvis isn't dead to that MIT scientist with 17 degrees. And they're all online.
It's also created an instant feedback loop, where you instantly measure how "good" your publishing is by tracking clicks, page time metrics, and referrals.
It even provides a zero-overhead revenue model. The money's not what publishing used to be, but hey, you can tap into it without having to do much.
Finally, because of the previous items, it has destroyed traditional journalism. What do I see when I consume journalism today? I see fear. Everybody knows it's dead and internet eyeballs is the only thing that does anything. The person and their emotional connection over Twitter, FB, YouTube and the like is the brand, not the paper or magazine. Everybody knows that.
This means the old guard is gone, the people who used to sit in an office and tell you that your story was crap. They cost too much in overhead and nobody cares if your story was crap as long as you correct it the next day. (It's all self-correcting, right?)
So instead of news, we now have celebrities who give their personal impressions of how it all makes them feel. People reward or punish publishers by their ability to draw them into some event and make them feel one way or the other. This reporter (I use the term loosely) knew how to do a great job of that. He also knew that the emotional content far outweighed the rest of it. People loved him. His publisher loved him.
Until they didn't.
The only reason he was fired, the only reason BigNetCorp X would care if they're screwing you over or not, is because enough other people were able to raise a big enough rukus that it couldn't be ignored. He could have kept doing this for years as long as he was willing to scale his fabrications in accordance to how much of a PR stink people could have made.
While interesting as a stand-alone story, my feeling is that each of these just makes the next bunch more clever.
It's not a very good time to be alive for people who like journalism.
The irony is that nearly every prestigious American publication has run dozens of versions of this story, and while most of those should be presumed to be factually accurate, they are fundamentally the same work of fiction.
It's not difficult to push your agenda with it technically being "true". Just interview 100 people, focus on 1 or two, maybe take their quotes out of context, and congratulations you can portray an entire town or demographic in a negative light that fits with your readers preconceived notions
I agree, the bizarre fascination with a very small demographic (Coal miners/truck drivers/diner patrons are still with Trump!) strikes me as simultaneously condescending to rural Americans while also missing the real story, especially considering 40 congressional seats flipped this year in "Whole Foods" territory.
The blue wave was powered by modestly affluent suburban voters in places like NoVA, New Jersey, Orange County and the Philadelphia suburbs. Aka, Whole Foods/Harris Teeter territory.
The big story is actually that the DNC was able to flip only a small amount of house seats, instead of the landslide they were expected to get, and also that the DNC lost Senate seats.
What?? 40 seats is huge. The house popular vote is the biggest for any switch of power since we started counting.
Though I should say for the record when someone says “DNC” like this it usually means they learned what the DNC was from the Russia hacks, given the DCCC is mostly in charge of house races and has been increasingly sidelined by small dollar funding and independent PACs like Bloomberg’s.
I remember an interesting discussion I read either here or on reddit between an American and a German where the German stated that he believed he had an accurate idea of what life was like in the US. I didn't have an opinion on who was right or wrong in that discussion at the time but if the lies stated in this article about this town did not immediately send off the bullshit detector for most Germans I'm afraid they've been fed a significant amount of misinformation and propaganda and really have no idea how we live here.
I have lived in Europe for about 5 years now, and sadly this is correct. German and French media in particular seem to delight in disparaging America and Americans.
Most Germans I've talked to are incredibly misinformed about what life in America is actually like. They think the entire country is more like a small southern town and that police roam the streets shooting citizens at random.
We have our problems of course and are far from perfect but the extent of them is grossly exaggerated by European media.
I spent a month in Germany in the mid-90's as a high school student. At the time, Bay Watch was big thing, and the (friendly, nice) people I met had a pretty tough time wrapping their heads around the idea that my experience, living in California, did not include warm beaches, that I didn't surf, etc.
It's really easy to pick up caricatures of life in foreign countries. I don't think anyone is immune to imaging that foreigners are more exotic and strange than they really are. I remember someone on an American forum confidently saying that in anime, a character's family owning a car was supposed to indicate great wealth because car ownership was super rare in Japan -- a vast exaggeration of a minor demographic difference.
> It's really easy to pick up caricatures of life in foreign countries.
I'm a German who's lived abroad for the majority of his life. This statement is so true. I've heard of Africans asking if Hitler was still in power, Americans thinking Germans all lived in castles, and Germans wondering whether we had electricity in Zambia. If you've never lived there, how can you know?
I have dozens of American friends and frequently read American publications. I daresay I have some understanding of US culture from this exposure - but even so I still don't know what it's like to actually live in the United States.
Even the southern towns aren't like their caricatures. Don't feel bad, people in California do the same thing and they don't even have the excuse of language or distance.
Which is actually part of the problem. Hollywood is in is in own massive filter bubble, and what Hollywood portrays about America is what the world believes... whereas most Americans look at Hollywood/Los Angeles with the same confused bemusement.
Wow, Der Spiegal’s lack of fact checking is sad, and it seems like pure fraudulent writing. I love the breakdown of counter-investigative journalism here.
I wonder if this guy is just a compulsive liar who happened to fake his way into a journalism career; I wonder if we'll hear stories from his acquaintances about this.
>I wonder if this guy is just a compulsive liar who happened to fake his way into a journalism career
That accurately describes one of the established ways to bookend a stint in politics. In the UK, this caliber of bullshit would either tip them for a future cabinet post should they ever stand for election, or indicate that they are a recently retired MP, fabricating scandal to preserve some remaining public relevance, which they know only how to measure in inches of print.
To be honest, my impression of modern journalism at established news organizations is:
* business model crashing, so experienced staff laid off
* smart millennials don't opt for a career in journalism
* the ones who do emerge inculcated by the college monoculture, largely unable to question authority
* growing up with net-access, they are ill-equipped for any method of fact-finding except google searches
* laziness, incompetence and docile conformity make them soft targets for vested interests
* many stories are therefore just regurgitated press releases
* many 'reactions' are strikingly uniform across independent organizations
On the bright side, the internet allows real information to route around the established press, greatly reducing their ability to shape public opinion or suppress stories that don't fit someone's agenda. We could be entering a golden age of independent journalists whose careers live and die by their reputation for integrity. But even if we are not, wikileaks style journalism -- the transmission of source documents -- should see us through.
I've taken to stopping at the Fergus Falls Walmart on my way through. I guess I got a bit old and need that stop after Fargo for gas and food. Its basically half-way between Fargo and Alexandria which means its going to have lower traffic because both of them are bigger. Plus, along that route Fargo & St. Cloud have cheaper gas prices. It is a good stop point if you are having car trouble or the weather gets a bit too much to handle.
1) Fargo, ND often has the cheapest gas in the area because it has 3 pipelines going through the town.
In 2014, Relotius sold two stories to the monthly magazine of a Swiss paper, both interviews with hairdressers. The second one (still online: https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar...), a supposed interview with a Finnish hairdresser immediately received a comment from someone in Finland ("this report seems to be fiction"), complaining that the mentioned salon doesn't actually exist, the mentioned prices were all wrong and the mentioned name had the wrong gender. The magazine printed a correction and decided to no longer work with the author.
No offense to Finnish hairdressers, but if someone completely fabricates a story this meaningless, it's reasonable to assume that he's a pathological liar and not a single written word of his can be taken seriously.
Given that the guy was such a pathological liar, even about trivial matters, I find it very hard to believe that no one supposedly ever had any suspicion about the truthfulness of writing.
David Kriesel (the guy who detected the Xerox issue 3 years ago) has been data mining Spiegel Online (the online version of Der Spiegel) for a couple of years now. It will be interesting to see what other articles are full of fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpwsdRKt8Q
Maybe David is willing to hand out the data he has downloaded?
If it weren't because the article came out in 2017, I'd have thought that this Relotius fellow played too much "Far Cry V" and thought it was a documentary.
Also, TIL that many germans haven't watched "Game of Thrones", apparently.
Even something like the claim that the city administrator was a gun-toting virgin is something that a fact-checker is expected to call and independently confirm. And even if the guy gives a non-committal denial, e.g. "That's ridiculous, I don't want have anything to do with your left-wing fake news article!", the fact-checker should be prying the reporter for all the documentation/notes that support the claim. In fact, in this scenario, the fact-checker should be highly suspicious that the city official is so standoffish, if the reporter managed to gain his trust enough in the first place to reveal that he's a virgin (and is ostensibly embarrassed about it).
Der Spiegel has a lot of questions it has to answer for how it failed so thoroughly for so many years here.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716613