LÜGENPRESSE, FAKE NEWS MEDIA 🇺🇲 The rural Americans who destroyed DER SPIEGEL: "die-hard liberals like me can still magically live alongside conservative Republicans — that sometimes we even find some common ground and share a meal together, and take the time to try to understand each other’s viewpoints. You see, we’re definitely not perfect here in Fergus Falls, and many of us feel a lot of responsibility right now, considering that our friends, family and neighbors voted against their own interests in 2016. But we also know how it feels to be ignored in policy and media for decades only to be lectured by ignorant articles such as this after so much silence about our challenges.
So, now I’m glad that I didn’t waste my time talking to Relotius. I’m grateful not to have had my name permanently embedded into his article. But my friends and neighbors in the article are not so lucky and they deserve to reclaim their stories, as well as to hear apologies from Der Spiegel and Relotius.
Unfortunately now, even if it is in German, there is false historical documentation of our community that is not only completely wrong, but that our faces, our landscapes and our community’s name were used for, in service of perpetuating an ugly and exaggerated stereotype during a time when we, in both urban and rural places, need to find ways to understand each other more than to be divided.
So it would be remiss of us to not to have a little hope that a few months of writing out here on the prairie might lead to others to seriously question Relotius and others writers’ credibility and intentions in telling the rural story. Or at least to inspire a better publication out there to do better work, to lift up the stories that are coming directly from rural people themselves, and help us share the real story of who we are and what our future might hold."
(Michele and Jake live in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where they collaborate on weird community art projects, sing karaoke in friends’ living rooms and gossip about local politics. You can contact them on twitter at @micheleeamn and @jakekrohn)
#fakenews #fakenewsmedia #lügenpresse #luegenpresse #derspiegel
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7
So, now I’m glad that I didn’t waste my time talking to Relotius. I’m grateful not to have had my name permanently embedded into his article. But my friends and neighbors in the article are not so lucky and they deserve to reclaim their stories, as well as to hear apologies from Der Spiegel and Relotius.
Unfortunately now, even if it is in German, there is false historical documentation of our community that is not only completely wrong, but that our faces, our landscapes and our community’s name were used for, in service of perpetuating an ugly and exaggerated stereotype during a time when we, in both urban and rural places, need to find ways to understand each other more than to be divided.
So it would be remiss of us to not to have a little hope that a few months of writing out here on the prairie might lead to others to seriously question Relotius and others writers’ credibility and intentions in telling the rural story. Or at least to inspire a better publication out there to do better work, to lift up the stories that are coming directly from rural people themselves, and help us share the real story of who we are and what our future might hold."
(Michele and Jake live in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where they collaborate on weird community art projects, sing karaoke in friends’ living rooms and gossip about local politics. You can contact them on twitter at @micheleeamn and @jakekrohn)
#fakenews #fakenewsmedia #lügenpresse #luegenpresse #derspiegel
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7
Medium
Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town
Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn