One of the made up stories, “ In a small town,” was billed as “a month with the people who pray for Trump on Sundays” and described Fergus Falls, Minnesota, as a typical rural town that helped propel President Trump to the White House in 2016 - though he just fell short in Minnesota.
Relotius reported false information about several of the town’s residents — or completely made up people — including that the city administrator did not want a female president and was a virgin, that a restaurant waitress with kidney disease was struggling to afford treatment under Obamacare, and that local students visiting New York visited Trump Tower instead of the Statue of Liberty.
Two residents of Fergus Falls, Michele Anderson, who notes she’s a “die-hard liberal,” and Jake Krohn, pushed back on 11 of the fabrications in a blog post Wednesday.
“There are only two things those writers seem to have concluded or are able to pitch to their editors — we are either backwards, living in the past and have our heads up our asses, or we’re like dumb, endearing animals that just need a little attention in order to keep us from eating the rest of the world alive,” they wrote about journalists who have made sweeping generalizations about people who live in rural parts of the country.
Der Spiegel listed other fabrications made in the article, such a welcome sign for the town that said, “Mexicans Keep Out,” that never existed.
“He invented grotesque lies and reported, for example, that the students at the John F. Kennedy high school drew their role models for the American dream as follows: ‘They did not draw a single picture of a woman,’ Relotius wrote. ‘One class drew Barack Obama, two drew John D. Rockefeller. Most of them drew Donald Trump.’ All of this is pure fiction. Every single bit is concocted bunk,” the magazine said.
Other fabrications included easily verifiable assertions, including that the film “American Sniper,” two years old at the time of Relotius’ reporting, was still running at the town’s theater to sold-out crowds and a description of the view from a downtown cafe, an establishment that lacks windows.
Relotius, who was hired by Der Speigel in 2011, received several awards from CNN for his work. The company said it is stripping Relotius of those awards. He wrote about 60 articles for the magazine and website before he was fired this week.
Forget it,CNN, you own him. Better check out all your other reporters.
The awards were well-earned since he routinely trashed the President and confirmed the liberal stereotype of small-town America. Because these were lies in the service of the “greater good” they were not lies at all. Rather, they were part of an effort by our betters to educate those of us who do not understand the twin evils of our President and our country. That this is so is confirmed by the “news” spewed forth by the MSM on a daily basis. If you disagree (and you have a strong stomach) try watching MSNBC or CNN for a day.