A contention I find odd about Relotius is this idea that his lies were brilliantly concealed. His pieces fed conventional stereotypes about other societies among Spiegel's readership in a flippantly emotive style that can at best be accessible and at worst condescending
Relotius didn't get away with it because he was some kind of literary genius. He got away with it because his pieces so seamlessly copied the conventional tropes of post-1990 German journalism that no one could tell the difference between his work and genuinely researched stories
I've been reading Spiegel since I was a kid. Every tmonths there is a story about "those crazy small time Americans", "the rebellious French", "inscrutable Turks", "chaotic Italians", "eccentric Brits", "moody Russians", "wild Arabs", "ungovernable Ukrainians" and so on
That's not to say there isn't some fantastic journalism produced by Spiegel. The dogged determination of many Spiegel journalists is what makes it a must read every month.
But how Spiegel and many other German news outlets fall back on unreflective language lathered in old stereotypes and tired tropes that entrench social prejudices many journalists want to fight needs to be discussed. The Relotius crisis is about so much more than fact-checking
A media culture that too easily falls back on rhetorical tropes and stylistic devices that build on entrenched social prejudices is going will inevitably be vulnerable to literary fraudsters skilled at producing florid copy that confirms reader expectations
Claas Relotius didn't just get away with it because of a fact-checking problem. He got away with it because he told so many in Germany and the wider world what they wanted to hear.
Anhang: A media culture that regularly produces these kinds of covers needs to ask itself whether it has gone too far in pandering to the prejudices of its readers 
