"[W]hile many German journalists report honestly from this country, going to great lengths to travel and meet ordinary people..."

"... the gun-toting, death-penalty-seeking, racist American nonetheless remains a stock character of much superficial coverage, particularly in left-leaning outlets such as Hamburg-based Der Spiegel. Ugly Americans, and American ugliness, crop up repeatedly in [the fake reporting of Claas Relotius]... [O]n the outskirts of rural Fergus Falls, Minn., a majority of whose voters backed President Trump in 2016, Relotius purportedly found a large sign — 'almost impossible to overlook,' he wrote — reading 'Mexicans Keep Out.' The fact that no one in the U.S. press or social media had previously spotted the sign apparently did not prompt so much as a follow-up call to Fergus Falls by Der Spiegel’s editors. They believed what they found believable. Their credulousness was rooted partly in truth — xenophobia, gun violence and the rest are real problems in the United States, just as anti-foreigner violence was, and is, in Germany. But it also reflected bias: Contempt for American culture has a long history among the continental European cognoscenti, the sort of people who read Der Spiegel and write for it."

Writes WaPo's Charles Lane in a column that I read because the headline evoked my contempt for the American mainstream press —  "I thought fraud in reporting was done for. I was wrong."

The headline makes him sound like a naif, and that is supported by some of the text. Lane was the editor in chief of The New Republic when it was humiliated by the Stephen Glass scandal in the 1990s. But after the Jack Kelley and Jayson Blair scandals in the early 2000s, Lane says he thought, "Surely computer-aided fact-checking would deter fraud." That still doesn't support the headline, because to deter something doesn't mean it's over. Lane confesses, "my hope was naive. Reporters keep inventing stories and getting prizes for them."

Why, with all the accusations of "fake news" these days, would you snuggle up inside a hope that computer-facilitated fact-checking was preventing fraudulent reporting? You can see in the quoted passage above that the bad stories get published because human beings are involved in the process. They have to read critically and get suspicious about things that don't sound true before they do the work of checking. But the editors get excited by things they want to publish — the things that serve their interests and that confirm their fears and hopes. Ironically, it was Charles Lane's hope that made him slack off in maintaining skepticism about whether fraudulent reporting was still going on. And this is the man who got burned by the Stephen Glass fiasco!

They made a movie about it: