In recent weeks and months, we have been repeatedly confronted with reports, photos and videos of the war in Ukraine. The reproduction in the television news was often accompanied by the comment that the source could not be verified. "Between truth and propaganda - the war and the media" was the topic of the Phoenix Roundtable on 8 April 2022. Two statements in the discussion were particularly striking: "War and lies are twins", said journalist Georg Mascolo. And historian Sönke Neitzel added: "All modern wars were also media wars."
The controversy surrounding a video from the Kiev suburb of Butsha provides a concrete example. It shows shocking images of corpses at the side of the road. Eyewitnesses reported that Russian soldiers had deliberately shot civilians there. The denial by the Russian Ministry of Defence was quickly refuted by satellite images. The claim then circulated online that two of the allegedly lifeless bodies were moving, meaning that the people shown in the video were not dead at all. "Faktenfuchs", the verification department of Bavarian broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, then made it plausible that these alleged movements were probably optical illusions. Incidentally, it speaks in favour of journalistic due diligence when one hears and reads more and more frequently: "The information cannot be independently verified."
The topic of false reports and media fakes has a long history. An early example: King Ludwig II, the Bavarian regent with the greatest public impact to this day, did not think much of journalists. All the more surprising was an article about "Ludwig of Bavaria" that appeared in November 1886, shortly after the king's death, in the prestigious American magazine Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. In it, the author Lew Vanderpoole reported on a private audience with the king, who had received him for an interview in February 1882. The article attracted a great deal of attention, not least because of some striking personal statements, and until recently has also been cited repeatedly by historians.
"Royal Bavarian fake news" - under this title, the Süddeutsche Zeitung made it plausible on 21 October 2017 that the whole story was most likely a lie. Belgian private scholar Luc Roger was able to prove that the author was a fraud who had been sued and arrested in New York for literary fraud. So media lies sometimes have very long legs.
The buzzword "lying press" has been haunting the public debate for some time now. In 2014, this term was chosen as the unword of the year by the linguistic criticism campaign. It is a little-known fact that the term has a long tradition dating back to the early 19th century. During the First World War, it was used for the foreign press and later for ideological and political opponents. Communists turned against the "lying press of the bourgeoisie", National Socialists against the "Jewish-Marxist lying press". Today, this buzzword is often used by right-wing extremists, who make sweeping statements against what they call the "system media". This is based on conspiracy theories and a general suspicion of conspiracy.
Donald Trump has also popularised the term "fake news" in our country. The former American president used it to stigmatise critical reporting by professional journalists. "You are some of the most dishonest people on earth," he said to the media the day after his inauguration. In doing so, he continued the scolding of journalists that he had begun during the election campaign. He himself favoured unfiltered communication via Twitter, making him the first head of state to permanently use social media for his own purposes.
The Internet is the least immune to false reports. Anyone can become a broadcaster here. There are plenty of examples: ever since the plane attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, conspiracy theories and wandering legends have been buzzing around the web. After the attack on the Olympic shopping centre in Munich, the terrorist attack on the synagogue in Halle and, most recently, the coronavirus crisis, communicative hoaxes were also booming.
The Prussian General Clausewitz stated: "A large part of the news one receives in war is contradictory, an even larger part is false and by far the largest part is subject to considerable uncertainty." However, scepticism is also appropriate when observing the mass media in times of peace. Journalism is a social system that relentlessly pillories failures in all areas of public or private life, but is quite blind to its own failures. As the saying goes: "In the house of the hanged man, there is no talk of a rope." Perhaps this is the reason why false reports and media falsification are rarely discussed in journalism. Communication science is also conspicuously reticent in this area.
The following is about "fake news" from journalists. The aim is to identify and analyse fake traps of very different kinds. I would like to present six such traps using examples.
The originality trap
Even the so-called quality media are not immune to fakes: their sore point is originality. In the cover story of its 2018 Christmas issue, Der Spiegel magazine came up with a sensational revelation: it was about one of the biggest journalistic falsification scandals of the post-war period - this time, unfortunately, within its own organisation. The author - Ullrich Fichtner, senior editor in the society department and designated editor-in-chief at the time - had to admit that the magazine had published dubious reports for years.
The "in-house press release" of that issue states: "Our colleague Claas Relotius did not rely on research, but used his imagination, made up quotes, scenes and people to make many of his stories seem better, more exciting." The author of the cover story concentrates on the perpetrator and thus follows the principle of personalisation that also dominates the paper - the question of the system is ignored. How could this happen in a highly staffed newsroom? And in a media company that has always prided itself on its legendary documentation department with more than 60 highly specialised employees? An external commission of enquiry and the subsequent public debate have provided some answers to these questions.
For years, Relotius met the expectations of the attention economy in Der Spiegel and several other renowned print media and delivered "well-rounded" stories. The pressure to be original then led to a mixture of fact and fiction. This author has repeatedly received recognition for his quasi-literary texts - some twenty journalism prizes bear witness to this.
The SZ magazine was also a prime example. This Friday supplement of the Süddeutsche Zeitung caused a sensation not only with its stylistic brilliance and successful visuals, but also with its unconventional interviews with Hollywood stars such as Sharon Stone and Brad Pitt. These interviews, conducted by the Los Angeles-based reporter Tom Kummer, revealed astonishing insights into the souls of the stars. They were "exclusive" in two senses: extraordinary - and fictitious.
After the forgery cases were uncovered, Kummer tried his hand as a media theorist. He characterised his way of working as a montage of different sources and moved it closer to "conceptual art". "I thought it was great to dismantle everything, to deconstruct everything, especially in a mainstream medium like journalism, which obviously has to function according to very clear ideas," Kummer said in an interview in 2001. The author had already summarised his own understanding of his profession in the term "borderline journalism" a year earlier.
The quota trap
On 23 December 1996, the 12th Grand Criminal Chamber of the Koblenz Regional Court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Born to four years in prison for fraud, forgery of documents, incitement of the people and other offences. Between 1990 and 1995, he had sold almost two dozen counterfeit films to several German-language television stations. Most of them had been broadcast by the tabloid magazine Stern TV on RTL.
The court's hearing of evidence revealed considerable contributory negligence on the part of the editors responsible at Stern TV and the presenter Günther Jauch: they had neither doubted nor even checked the accuracy of the macabre and bizarre stories. And the primitive props such as mirror-inverted swastikas, a glued-on full beard and the like were simply (or should we say: gladly?) overlooked. Born was able to place his film forgeries easily because he behaved in line with the market.
Fraud on the viewer? Of course - but such fraud has not yet been penalised. The editorial team was penalised for fraud - even though it had benefited from rising ratings and higher advertising revenue. The taz commented at the time: "The real culprits in the broadcasting organisations can lean back [...] - their outsourcing of guilt has proved its worth: The small-time dealer was punished and not the godfathers."
The circulation trap
The ratings trap in television corresponds to the circulation trap in the press. Fictitious interviews with celebrities have their origins here. An early victim was the Persian ex-emperor Soraya, whose name then became the generic name of a group of rainbow papers: On 29 April 1961, Das Neue Blatt printed an "exclusive interview" with Soraya, which a freelancer had made up. Princess Caroline of Monaco - along with many others - later suffered a similar fate.
Over the years, the relevant case law has led to a sharp rise in damages for such violations of personal rights, without being able to eradicate fake interviews. During the last parliamentary election campaign, a Turkish newspaper printed an interview with Armin Laschet that never took place.
The alleged Hitler diaries, which were heralded as a global sensation, were also intended to increase circulation. However, they led to a loss of confidence in Stern from which it has not yet recovered.
The topicality trap
"Robbie brought show out of coma" - under this headline, the Viennese tabloid Österreich reported on 4 December 2010 about the previous evening's TV show Wetten, dass ...? "Robbie Williams and Take That reunited on the Gottschalk couch. A first: Robbie performed twice on the show, once solo and then with a band," the newspaper said.
In reality, the programme went very differently. Shortly after the start, contestant Samuel Koch fell while jumping over an oncoming car driven by his father. The live broadcast was cancelled. The shocked viewers were spared the advertised appearances by Robbie Williams and other celebrity guests. The bitter irony of this false report: The injured student had to be put into an induced coma following immediate surgery at Düsseldorf University Hospital. He is still suffering from the consequences of the serious accident today.
The author of the article had fallen into the topicality trap: he had written his article "cold" and had already put it into print before the event. Reviews of music concerts and theatre performances that never took place have been published in a similar way. The publication of false election results that were publicised prematurely also falls into this category.
False reports about deaths, which have often affected celebrities, are particularly sensitive. Mark Twain, to whom this had happened in America, received the following reply to his complaint from the editor responsible: "What's printed is printed. We never take anything back. We don't take that offence. All we can do is insert a new birth announcement from you. Price: one dollar!"
The instrumentalisation trap
While the cases described above were primarily examples of targeted journalistic staging, the media are victims of political instrumentalisation in another type of false reporting. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in particular have excelled here. The falsification methods of the fascists, Stalinists and Maoists have found docile pupils right up to the present day. What is new is that PR agencies are now increasingly being used to produce images of the enemy.
Atrocity propaganda has been a tried and tested means of psychological warfare since the Middle Ages. During the 1991 Gulf War, for example, the British agency Hill & Knowlton launched the horror story that "Iraqi soldiers had taken three hundred and twelve babies from their incubators and left them to die on the cool hospital floor of Kuwait City". This story, whose source was later presented as the underage daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA, was the particularly effective part of a multi-million dollar campaign with which the agency was to build up and reinforce an enemy image of Iraq.
Not only horror scenarios, but also heroic stories can be helpful here. The Third Iraq War has provided many examples of this. Entire propaganda companies were also deployed in later conflicts. Wars are always fought on the communication front - see, for example, the years of conflict in Syria and the current war in Ukraine.
The competence trap
The mass media were often not only the means, but also the targets of false reports. The Viennese engineer Arthur Schütz made a name for himself as a pioneer in this field. On 17 November 1911, as he later recalled, "under the compulsion of an incomprehensible impulse, I wrote down in one go, as if in a fever, the most hair-raising technical nonsense I could think of in the form of an earthquake report for the Neue Freie Presse. Everything about this report was mockery and derision, and nothing but a hellish whirlwind of inane coupling of all technical terms."
The next morning, the article appeared in the prestigious Viennese newspaper. The author was Dr Erich Ritter von Winkler, assistant at the central research institute of the Ostrava-Karwin coal mines. This completely absurd nonsense report also contained the sentence: "What is completely inexplicable, however, is the phenomenon that my pit dog, which was sleeping in the laboratory, gave conspicuous signs of great restlessness half an hour before the earthquake began."
What had the author done? In sociological terms, he had conducted a field experiment. He started from the hypothesis that a report would be accepted as soon as it "shimmered in the guise of science and was characterised by a good-sounding name" and "corresponded to the audience's well-developed trains of thought and the mentality of the newspaper". He was able to verify this hypothesis, this time and many more times. Schütz subsequently enriched scientific and technical civilisation
- around oval wagon wheels and refractory coals;
- around degenerators and rope grooves,
- sealed gear wheels, concrete worms, paraffin match factories and many other innovations.
In his important work on mining, published in 1556 under the title De re metallica, Agricola already described in great detail the wooden trolley that miners call a "dog". Since Schütz, this has become a press typological term. In contrast to the so-called newspaper duck, the simple false report, the pit dogs have a media-educational mission. Their breeders want to expose the journalists' lack of competence, want to chastise their ignorance.
Arthur Schütz died in 1960. The pit dogs live on. To this day, these Trojan animals with four wheels are fond of barking at their prey in scientific and technical reporting. There we find reports about the first successful prostate transplant or about bovine tomato cells, a successful fusion of plant and animal cells that makes the production of hamburgers much easier.
A concise conclusion
There is a wide range of "fake news" that can also be found in professional media. I have presented various different types. It was about
- cases in which journalists themselves have falsified;
- cases in which journalists and editorial offices have become victims of instrumentalisation - especially political instrumentalisation;
- cases in which journalists and editorial teams have been bitten by pit dogs.
False reports in the media have very different causes. What they have in common is that they violate professional standards in journalism. They often ignore several standards at the same time: the obligation to report truthfully as well as the standard of professional research and counter-investigation, the duty of care and the duty to check information.
On the other hand, journalistic norms also encourage false reports. First and foremost, the topicality norm should be mentioned here. Journalism is a time-based profession in a very special way. It is under pressure from periodicity sequences, which have become ever shorter over the course of history and have shrunk to zero in the live media of radio, television and online. The greater the distance in time to the object of the report, the less opportunity there is for thorough research, cross-checking and categorisation - the journalism system is becoming increasingly susceptible to errors.
Sensitivity to errors has now grown, at least in the quality media. Many newspapers have set up correction columns based on the US model, in which even minor errors are corrected. Some broadcasters have set up their own fact-checking departments, which check audiovisual material in particular. This is desperately needed in times when image and sound manipulation is child's play.
The conditions for the possibility of false reports and media fakes also include the media's attention filters, both the general news factors and the particular line or basic orientation of the respective newspaper or broadcaster. This is where the blind spots to which Arthur Schütz drew attention lie.
In his day, the opinion media dominated. Schütz prepared his bait accordingly - and the editors took the bait. Today, the business media dominate. The type of bait is primarily determined by the pressure of circulation and insertion figures. It is a dangerous concoction of lack of research, pressure to be up-to-date and sensationalism that makes the business press and commercial broadcasters susceptible to false scoops.
