What made all this worse was the fact that Der Spiegel was looked up to for (supposedly) having a solid team of fact-checkers.
As the medium post shows (and the magazine's own investigation afterwards) was that not even basic and publicly available info was checked, such as the percentage of pro-Trump voters, let alone the rest of the original article's hilariously ridiculous claims.
Another Der Spiegel reporter who was suspicious of Relotius tried raising his concerns with the management after he did some digging of his own, which almost cost him his job and reputation:
Der Spiegel enjoyed the profits of Relotius' fiction and peddled literal fake news to the world for years, and the magazine's readers lapped it all up because it reinforced their biases.
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
What made all this worse was the fact that Der Spiegel was looked up to for (supposedly) having a solid team of fact-checkers.
As the medium post shows (and the magazine's own investigation afterwards) was that not even basic and publicly available info was checked, such as the percentage of pro-Trump voters, let alone the rest of the original article's hilariously ridiculous claims.
Another Der Spiegel reporter who was suspicious of Relotius tried raising his concerns with the management after he did some digging of his own, which almost cost him his job and reputation:
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/02/26/inenglish/15511...
Der Spiegel enjoyed the profits of Relotius' fiction and peddled literal fake news to the world for years, and the magazine's readers lapped it all up because it reinforced their biases.