The Media is the Message > Die Welt Lied About RT; Twitter Rejects UN Rapporteur as Not Notable

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‘Will Die Welt acknowledge it was wrong?’ Head of RT in Germany

asks newspaper after courts rule it published lies about outlet

18 Aug, 2021 13:24

(L) © Die Welt; (R) © RT Deutsche;

The head of RT in Germany has challenged Die Welt to take responsibility for publishing untruthful facts harming RT DE’s reputation. The claims were made in a column about alleged Russian disinformation printed by the newspaper.

Dinara Toktosunova, head of RT in Germany, called out the influential media giant Axel Springer’s daily publication on Wednesday, citing two injunctions ordered by German courts. Both rulings dealt with the same opinion piece published by Die Welt last month, which was highly critical of the channel and made several claims that RT DE found objectionable. The district court in Berlin and Frankfurt sided with the channel, agreeing that the column stated untruthful facts about RT DE.

“I hope our colleagues will have the dignity to acknowledge their mistake,” Toktosunova said on social media.

Or was it a mistake or a deliberate provocation, what do you think?

The column, bylined by Die Welt writer Ulrich Clauss, sought to expose a purported Russian disinformation campaign in Germany and targeted RT DE as one of its elements. The alleged operation, the article said, was being conducted under the so-called ‘Gerasimov doctrine’. It's a non-existent Russian military policy that even Mark Galeotti, the person who coined the term, acknowledged was a product of translation error.

Two of the claims that made RT DE file complaints in German courts were about the infamous 2016 ‘Lisa case’. Lisa F. is a Russian-German girl who went missing for several days, scaring her family. After returning home, she claimed she had been raped. German police later said the girl actually ran away from problems at school and that the accusations were fabricated. The investigators also found that Lisa, who was 13 at the time, did have a sexual relationship with an adult man, Ismet S., who was consequently tried for violating German age of consent laws and sentenced to a suspended term in 2017.

The situation caused a top-level diplomatic rift between Russia and Germany and fueled anti-immigrant sentiments in Germany, after the girl’s family reportedly falsely claimed that her alleged rapists were Arabs. Die Welt’s columnist claimed RT DE “invented” the case and called on the Russian-German community to protest. Both statements were falsehoods rather than opinions, the courts said.

The third point of the RT DE complaint was about a misleading passage citing Lennart Maschmeyer, a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. It said “broadcasters like ‘RT Deutsch’ remain the main actors in disinformation,” without explaining whether the quotation marks indicated a direct quote of the expert.

In fact, Maschmeyer’s February paper that the Die Welt article referred to did not mention the channel at all. So the courts agreed that a reasonable reader of the column could be left with a wrong impression of what the expert actually said in his research.

The August 11 ruling of the Frankfurt court said RT DE was correct in believing that the false claims harmed its reputation and ordered Die Welt to cease their dissemination. The Berlin court, which issued its decision on August 4, instructed the newspaper to add to the column a highly visible notice reflecting RT DE’s position. Both rulings can be appealed.

As of Wednesday, the controversial material remains available on Die Welt’s website in its original form.

Not notable enough? UN torture rapporteur who defended

 Assange gets rejected by Twitter for verification

18 Aug, 2021 23:08

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, shown at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 2, 2020.

©  REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Twitter apparently never heard of the UN special rapporteur for torture Nils Melzer – an outspoken defender of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, among others – since it denied his verification request, saying he wasn’t notable enough.

“Seriously?” Melzer tweeted on Wednesday, posting a screenshot of the message he received from Twitter’s Verification service saying that “the evidence provided did not meet our criteria for notability.”

“I am an official international mandate holder of [UN special procedures experts] appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, with an official webpage @UNHumanRights & countless publications & public appearances. “How (on earth) does that ‘not meet your criteria for notability’?” he fulminated.

One of the screenshots Melzer provided was of his UN biography page, which lists his extensive employment history, publications and notable UN work. The Swiss scholar has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment since November 2016.

As such, he has repeatedly spoken out about the illegal imprisonment of Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder who spent years trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK. After being stripped of his asylum and dragged out of the embassy in April 2019, Assange was sent to the Belmarsh prison outside London, where he has been held in de facto solitary confinement ever since, pending US demands to have him extradited on spurious “hacking” charges.

Melzer has also sought to protect the human rights of peaceful protesters, such as an elderly German woman whom a viral video showed being brutalized by police in Berlin, during an anti-lockdown protest earlier this month.

None of this seemed to matter to Twitter, which told Melzer in what appeared to be a form letter that they “could not reliably verify that the account associated with the request is a notable person, organization, or brand.” The San Francisco-based platform urged him to try again in 30 days.

Maybe he will be more famous in 30 days?

However, last week Twitter announced it was pausing the verification process to “make improvements to the application and review process,” so they can “get things right.”

The only way to get things right is to stop working for Deep State. Like that's going to happen.

Why Melzer got the form letter questioning his notability if this pause has been in effect since August 13, or why he was advised to try again before the verification resumes, remains unclear at this time.

 

Top Journalist at Reputable German Magazine Faked his Stories for Years

And MSM wonders why they are held in such little respect, even contempt

FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Christian Charisius

One of Germany’s most popular papers, Der Spiegel, has found itself at the center of a scandal involving one of its top reporters who was caught fabricating elements of his stories.

Claas Relotius, who worked at Der Spiegel as a freelancer for 6 years until receiving a staff position in 2017, seemed to be a paragon of modern journalism. The 33-year-old has received numerous prestigious journalism awards, both in Germany and abroad.

Just this December he was awarded a prize by the German reporter’s association for his story about the life of a child in Syria. In 2014, Relotius was warmly welcomed by CNN who named him ‘Journalist of the Year.’

However, his seemingly brilliant career has turned out to be a house of cards that is now falling apart, just as it had with Stephen Glass: a former staff writer at the New Republic who authored one of the most spectacular fabrication campaigns in the history of American journalism.

It was recently revealed that Relotius literally made up details in his stories and even “invented protagonists” – people he had never met in person.

One of his colleagues who was working with Relotius on a story about the situation on the US-Mexican border grew suspicious of some of the details in the journalist’s report. The man then tracked down two alleged sources Relotius quoted extensively in his text, only to find out that none of them ever actually met him.

The subsequent investigation by Der Spiegel into Relotius’ activities also uncovered that he fabricated details in another story including a claim that he had seen a sign in a US town that read: “Mexicans keep out.” When faced with the incriminating evidence, the journalist confessed to faking elements of his texts – not just in one story, but in a number of them.

So far, at least 14 stories out of almost 60 pieces the journalist wrote for Der Spiegel’s print and online editions turned out to contain fake details, the magazine said, adding that that figure might potentially be higher, and warning that other media outlets might also be affected.

I have quoted Der Spiegel several times on this and on my other blog, however, Relotius name never appeared on any of the stories.

Over the years, Relotius worked for about a dozen German news outlets, including the well-known Die Welt, Die Zeit and Financial Times Germany. Notably, the list of his stories that were proven to be at least partially fake included several pieces that had won journalism awards, including stories about Iraqi children kidnapped by Islamic State and prisoners in Guantanamo.

In a lengthy article which serves as both a clarification of the case and an apology, Der Spiegel said it was “shocked” by the discovery and offered an apology to its readers along with all those affected by Relotius’ articles. It also described the situation as "a low point in Der Spiegel's 70-year history."

Relotius, who resigned after the fraud came to light, told Der Spiegel that he regretted his actions and felt “deeply ashamed.” Meanwhile, the magazine’s management has set up a special investigative commission consisting of what it calls “experienced internal and external persons” to look through all of the journalist’s pieces and prepare recommendations to improve “safety mechanisms.”