The "Spiegel" is widely accused of having helped reporter Claas Relotius publish so many fake stories for so long thanks to the increasing trend of opinionated journalism. The residents of a small US town walk around with guns and watch "American Sniper" over and over again in the cinema. While a desperate woman and her child are on the march to the USA, armed members of a US vigilante group are on the lookout for intruders on the border with Mexico, who then send them back to the desert.
That is the sound that the "Spiegel" would like to hear; the organ that has been proclaiming the "end of the world" since Donald Trump came to power and is determined to write the US president off singapore rcs data the map. In contrast, the supposedly good is sought out and the evil is denounced. If necessary, even without evidence, reality as a victim of will and madness. If the US town had been described, as the follow-up research has shown, as a collection of perhaps odd but thoroughly likeable people and not as a collection of grim Trump voters, in the truest sense of the word hillbillies who are at home behind an invented dark forest, would the story have flowed so smoothly into the "Spiegel"?
Why was the great documentary not even able to determine the correct number of Trump voters, or to expose the claim that there was a sign at the entrance to the town saying "Mexicans, piss off" as a fabrication? If the refugee woman with child had been portrayed as an irresponsible mother, a drug addict and eager to get into the drug trade in the USA, while the members of the US vigilante group had been portrayed as humanitarian citizens who, while preventing refugees from crossing the border illegally, primarily want to save them from the smuggling gangs, would this article have appeared in "Spiegel"? Hardly.