A girl from Syria died at the EU’s external border, the magazine wrote. Now the “Spiegel” has admitted serious mistakes. The editors had previously published made-up articles about refugees. That might not be a coincidence.
A magazine, but not a news magazine: The “Spiegel” building in Hamburg.
In Germany, the “Spiegel” is reflexively referred to as a news magazine. “As the news magazine Der Spiegel reports…”, it is often said. The editors may be right. News magazine, that sounds important and above all: serious. From a journalistic point of view, the term is misleading. There is no large, printed news magazine in Germany. If only because a magazine has to offer much more than news. Reports, major interviews and investigative research form the core of the brand. This makes magazines the opposite of the fast-paced news business.
There is a second reason why the classification as a news magazine at “Spiegel” is misleading. The impostor Claas Relotius was able to publish dozens of articles there, most of which were fictional. The editors presented the matter as an isolated case and vowed to improve. This year, however, doubts arose again as to the veracity of two extensive searches by the magazine.
One case concerns a Syrian girl named Maria, who is said to have died at the EU’s external border in the summer. According to “Spiegel”, the Greek authorities are to blame for the death because they control the EU border and act robustly. The question quickly arose in Greece as to whether the dead girl really existed. After the doubts had intensified, the “Spiegel” took all four articles about it from its website in November and announced an investigation.
Checked texts never go online again
The magazine published the result on the eve of New Year’s Eve. A good time when you don’t want a message to get a lot of attention. The result of the internal research is impressive: The articles about the girl’s death that were taken from the Internet will never go online again. A revision makes no sense. “Too much in it would have to be corrected,” writes the magazine in its final report on the Maria case.
Did Maria exist now? Did she actually die from a scorpion sting on the Turkish-Greek border? This question could not be clarified even after extensive research by the “Spiegel”. According to the magazine, however, there are some indications “that some of the refugees could have invented the death in their desperation.”
It is certain that a group of migrants wandered around the Turkish-Greek border area for days in the summer in high heat. According to the “Spiegel”, some of them lived on islands in the border river Evros and from there they sent desperate messages to asylum activists and the “Spiegel” via mobile phone. Since the region is a restricted military area, the editors could not convince themselves of the truthfulness of the descriptions.
How did speculation become fact?
It now seems clear that no reporter or activist saw the dead girl. Her family cannot say where it is believed to be buried and have no photographs to prove the child’s existence. According to the parents, Maria had a twin sister, and there was talk of five children in total. According to “Spiegel”, only four children of the family appear on several lists of names of the fifty-strong migrant group.
How did Der Spiegel make death a fact? A woman from the refugee group described the girl’s death via voice message and sent a picture. A girl with closed eyes and a “hematoma-like discoloration on the left thigh” could be seen on it. Giorgos Christides, a Greek employee of the “Spiegel”, then apparently sent an English-language text to the editors. In it, the girl’s death was not clearly described as a fact. According to the “Spiegel” investigation report, this only happened during the translation, which was carried out by a senior editor in the foreign department.
For reasons of time, they refrained from having the text checked by the documentation. This is what the “Spiegel” calls a department that checks articles for correctness of content. The “Spiegel” documentation enjoyed a good reputation for a long time. In the Relotius case, however, it failed completely.
Numerous media picked up the news of the allegedly dead girl. The political assessment in the “Spiegel” sounded like this: “Greece and the Greek authorities would rather watch a five-year-old girl die than let two or three dozen refugees into the country and take them in.” This sentence was said by one of the journalists who contributed to the articles about Maria in a podcast of the magazine. It is to the credit of the “Spiegel” that he included such statements in his final report.
Comedian takes legal action against article
In addition to the Maria case, the “Spiegel” also got into trouble with another search this year. At the end of 2021, several editors of the magazine published a text about Luke Mockridge, currently the most successful German comedian. The authors quote completely anonymous women who accuse Mockridge of touching them against their will. Key witness is a publicly known ex-girlfriend of the comedian, who has accused him of attempted rape.
The article creates an aura of factuality and ultimately portrays the comedian as a sex offender. The courts before which Mockridge then sued, however. In contrast to the Maria reporting, the text is still online, but in an abridged version after several court judgments against the “Spiegel”.
Parallels to the Relotius case
As in the Maria case, there is much to suggest that the editors adopted the perspective of activists and relied on statements that cannot be independently verified. Mockridge plunged reporting into a serious personal crisis, as the “Spiegel” article resulted in a massive campaign against him on social media. Now he is suing the “Spiegel” under civil law for damages.
What do these examples have to do with the Relotius case? In contrast to Relotius, the “Spiegel” journalists involved probably didn’t invent anything or deliberately deceived their audience. You simply made several wrong turns during your research.
The similarity to Relotius is nevertheless obvious: Both the Maria case and the Causa-Mockridge fit into a certain worldview in which border guards are devil stuff and men are basically perpetrators. Relotius’ texts fit in here – for example his largely fictional report about border guards in the USA or a text about a refugee girl in Syria who allegedly dreams of Angela Merkel at night. Whether this child exists is just as uncertain as the existence of the Syrian girl Maria.