,
9 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
So, here’s a little story about this DerSpiegel football reporter who says here: “Everyone at Der Spiegel reports with the utmost care”. #Relotius #Relotiuspresse
During the WorldCup in 2014, he wrote that notorious match fixer Wilson Raj Perumal told him hours before Cameroon faced Croatia that Cameroon would throw the match. Perumal predicted Cameroon would lose 4-0 after a first-half red card, Buschmann wrote. m.spiegel.de/sport/fussball…
The piece, which ran after Cameroon lost 4-0 and following a red card, created a sensation in the middle of the tournament, forcing Cameroon and FIFA to launch an investigation.
Perumal denied having made the claims before the match. He insisted he had voiced his suspicions to Buschmann after the game in a Facebook chat. In other words, he had no inside information that the game was fixed, it was just his post-game analysis.
While Perumal was hardly trustworthy, it wasn’t clear why someone who had just served a prison sentence and was cooperating with authorities would expose himself to further scrutiny by confessing knowledge of a huge conspiracy to a reporter.
DerSpiegel, meanwhile, refused to offer any documentation to help FIFA corroborate the story.
Several weeks later, I interviewed Perumal for the WSJ in Budapest, where he was then living. He showed me the Facebook chats with Buschmann, which proved that the conversation about Cameroon had occurred after the game and not before. google.de/amp/s/www.wsj.…
When I asked DerSpiegel about it, they refused to engage. All they offered was a No Comment. No defense, no context. Nothing. Meanwhile, FIFA found no evidence to support the story and had dropped its probe. And that was the end of it.
Point is, the notion that DerSpeigel has a world class fact-checking department was always fiction. When caught out, they simply went silent. Any journalist who competed against them knows how fast and loose they are with the facts. Far from a surprise, #Relotius was inevitable.
