Fergus Falls, Revisited

Kids today might not believe that once upon a time people used encyclopedias – volumes of books often a decade old – to look up information about people, places, or things.
Way back in 1977 the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science informed readers that “Information has a unique quality as a resource and a commodity, the utility of which, in combination with its other values, is so pervasive as to result in the now common appellation given to the period of history ahead as “the information age.”
This pre-Internet Information Age is the Dark Ages of information. People had to use books with pages printed on dead trees to look up what they wanted to know. The cost of researching, collecting, and disseminating information that way was high; the cost of being wrong even higher. Getting it right took time, but getting it right was critical.
Encyclopedias were the best way “to set forth…the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge” wrote Jean le Rond d’Alembert, co-editor of the legendary French Encyclopédie, first published in 1751. His partner in the endeavor, Denis Diderot, stated that the Encyclopédie’s aim was nothing less than “to change the way people think.”
Unfortunately, the low-cost and high-speed of digitized information today often weakens the order and connection of human knowledge. It changes the way people think, but not always for the better. As Mark Twain might have put it, a lie can be Tweeted to a million followers before the victim even knows he’s been maligned.
The modern encyclopedia is an online resource, updated continuously by the seemingly inexhaustible output of mainline journalists and a new breed of “media professionals.” But the miracle of modern communications has diminished rather than enhanced the reputations of those who see it as their job to inform us and help write this chapter in human history.
In our gilded Age of Information fewer and fewer journalists bother with the basics of fact-checking. Too many of today’s information disseminators seem to consider the truth an inconvenient obstacle on the path toward promoting a narrative. Their narrative doesn’t depend on facts; it depends on faith and the suspension of disbelief.
In America we call this “fake news.” In German it translates as Gefälschte Nachrichten, and the once-highly respected German news source Der Spiegel has been outed as its purveyor. In any language it is a blight on a profession once seen as honorable and necessary to a free society.
In the Der Spiegel case, one of its award-winning journalists (and CNN’s Journalist of the Year, 2014) was forced to resign after more than a dozen of his features were found to be complete fabrications. It wasn’t that places like Fergus Falls, Minnesota, don’t exist. It’s just that nearly everything Claas Relotius wrote about it – people, places, things – was false.
To make matters worse, Der Spiegel’s vaunted “fact checkers” didn’t catch his lies; two amateurs did. Two bumpkins from the town Relotius caricatured for his oh-so-sophisticated European readers in “Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays” documented and corrected his fable.
The real piece of journalism (“Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town”) was published at Medium.com and is worth reading in full. To give you a taste, here’s one of Der Spiegel’s whoppers: The young town administrator was described as a man “would like to marry soon, he says, but he was never together with a woman. He has also never seen the ocean.”
Intrepid locals Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn debunked that lie with a photo of city leader Andrew Bremseth hugging his live-in girlfriend while standing in front of – you guess it – the ocean. Gefälschte Nachrichten!
The story behind the story of Claas Relotius’s fall and Der Spiegel’s international embarrassment is more insidious and less funny than the tales spun to make Trump’s America look bad. The real story is about how modern journalism has substituted bias-confirmation for fact-checking.
“Too good to check” is becoming the norm in a profession almost entirely driven by left-wing, Progressive narratives. Der Spiegel had what was once considered the biggest and best fact-checking department in the business. Yet when pressed it admitted that its fact-checking process “does not include contacting any subjects of articles,” and statements of fact are reviewed for “accuracy and plausibility.”
That phrase rings as hollow as Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” description of the lie that ended his career.
No one with a shred of common sense or a willingness to see their opposites as real people could have believed the story spun by Relotius. But German editors, a CNN awards committee, and (one assumes) millions of European readers did just that. The lies were plausible to them because they see “the other” only in caricature. Their world view is founded and supported by a cartoon version of those who don’t live and believe as they do.
That’s the real story – and real danger – behind the “fake news” meme.

Ken Gorrell can be reaches at kengorrell@gmail.com