A Story Too Good to Be True: The Manipulation of Truth Claims in Faked News
摘要
In 2018, former German star reporter Claas Relotius admitted that he manipulated most of his prize-winning feature stories. Why did no one suspect for a long time that his stories were a bit too good to be true? Instead of trying to differentiate facts from fiction, this article explores how facts and narrative interact in journalism. Drawing on Lars Elleström’s approach to how truthfulness in communication is based on indexicality (Semiotica 225, 423–446, 2018), the analysis looks for indexical traces of journalistic work in two news features published in Der Spiegel, one by Alexander Osang (Der Spiegel 37, 50–54, 2018) and the manipulated feature, “The story of Ahmed and Alin” by Claas Relotius (Der Spiegel 28, 127–34, 2016). The analysis explores how observed and verifiable details interact with elements of internal and external coherence. In Osang’s feature, the different indexical relationships are closely connected yet clearly separated. In Relotius’s manipulated feature, the different indexical relationships are not easily identified, and elements of coherence point towards each other instead of being grounded in observed and verifiable detail. This kind of analysis makes it possible to start to describe in more detail how a factual narrative is truthfully or only insufficiently grounded in actual events.