Thread by @MelvynIngleby

.@derspiegel powerfully debunks @volkskrant’s flawed reporting on fraud at Mayday, the foundation that supported the White Helmets. Many others have voiced criticism before.

Time to sum things up in a thread [1/42]
spiegel.de/international/…

De Volkskrant (hereafter VK) published the original Dutch article by @esvanana and Anneke Stoffelen on 17 July 2020 under the title “De zwarte bladzijde van de Witte Helmen” – The black page of the White Helmets (url: bit.ly/3DH1x4L) [2/42]

A rather clunky English translation was published shortly after, entitled “The confession of James le Mesurier”. The full text can be found here bit.ly/3s0iOE9, some of its key claims are in the screenshot below. [3/42]

James Le Mesurier was the man who helped establish the White Helmets and died in Istanbul on 11 November 2019. You’d expect extra care and caution from journalists who attack a dead person who can no longer defend himself. [4/42]

Instead, VK opted for an inflammatory piece written in a juicy and at times sarcastic style, in which Le Mesurier and his wife Emma Winberg feature as decadent jet setters guilty of fraud and self-enrichment. [5/42]

The main ‘beef’ of the story revolves around a sum of $50k which Le Mesurier took with him while coordinating a complex rescue operation in southern Syria, which saved 422 people. [6/42]

In the end, @derspiegel reports, James spent only $9,2k and offset the rest of the money against his own salary. When later asked what had happened to the $50k, he seems to have forgotten he already paid it back and made a very foolish mistake: he backdated a receipt. [7/42]

In a letter to donors written days before his death, James assumed full responsibility, called the handling of the 50k affair fraudulent and offered his resignation. The donors objected to the latter, but did request a forensic audit of Mayday. [8/42]

After months of investigation, this audit by accounting firm Grant Thornton concluded that “there is no evidence of misappropriation of funds”. Here is the relevant passage from the summary of the report, which VK saw before it published its piece. [9/42]

To be sure, the summary also concludes Mayday’s administration was chaotic and lacking in basic financial procedures – but that does not equal fraud or self-enrichment. [10/42]

Now, if a forensic audit invalidates the angle of your article, that sucks, but you might want to consider making some changes. Instead, VK ran the story as planned, simply squeezing Grant Thornton’s conclusion into a little box next to the article. [11/42]

As Christoph Reuter of @derspiegel succinctly puts it: “a rather strange method for declaring one’s own work to be inaccurate upon publication.” [12/42]

VK complains it was only provided with a summary and not the full Grant Thornton report. Like @derspiegel, it could just have cited sources who did get to see the full report, but it didn't [13/42]

Perhaps, as Mayday’s supervisory board member Cornelis Vrieswijk tells @derspiegel, VK wasn’t really that interested in the findings of an audit that could undermine its ‘scoop’. [14/42]

Other Mayday employees also complain that one of VK’s reporters, @esvanana, “chose to ignore [the things I told] and print the story she had conceived in her head.”

See screenshot below (Minka and Tjitske are other Dutch journalists who reported on Mayday) [15/42]

It gets worse. These are the 75 comments which Le Mesurier’s widow, Emma Winberg, provided to VK after receiving a draft text of the Dutch article (without translation) one day before publication. Next to none of them made it into the piece. [16/42]

Again, it seems VK wasn’t really interested anyway: Winberg was given 6 hours to respond and only heard back when the story was already out. Even purely factual comments, such as this minor point about a geographical location, were just ignored. [17/42]

VK did listen to another source, however: Johan Eleveld, a Dutchman who was hired as Mayday’s CFO in August 2018. Although VK doesn’t mention his name, Eleveld himself confirmed to multiple journalists that he was a source for VK’s story. [18/42]

It seems that VK considers Eleveld to be a brave whistleblower. Other journalists who interviewed him told me they instantly felt he was unreliable and “a psychopath”. Vrieswijk tells @derspiegel that he quickly found out his stories were “fantastical”. [19/42]

So who is Eleveld? According to @derspiegel, he previously worked in two companies that went bankrupt, is being investigated for wiring €190,000 to a company of which he was a board member, and never paid back a €10k loan he gave himself. Sounds like a trustworthy guy. [20/42]

As @derspiegel reports, Eleveld soon turned out to be a pretty useless accountant, buying incompatible software, hiring his own neighbour for services he didn’t deliver and using Mayday funds to buy himself lounge access at Schiphol airport. [21/42]

While James Le Mesurier worked day and night for the White Helmets, Eleveld showed little care for Mayday’s mission or the situation in Syria. Shockingly, colleagues also say he was in high spirits when Le Mesurier died, @derspiegel reports. [22/42]

According to his colleagues, Eleveld was on a mission to usurp Mayday from Le Mesurier and held a particularly strong grudge against Winberg. He was eventually fired. [23/42]

So to sum up: VK ran a story on fraud at Mayday after a forensic audit concluded there was none, disregarded perspectives that didn’t fit into its desired scoop, and relied on a source with a terrible track record and axes to grind. That’s just poor journalism. [24/42]

Yet instead of showing the slightest hint of self-examination or openness to criticism, VK has responded its critics with threats of legal action, furious rants, or silence. [25/42]

Aside from @derspiegel, those critics include journalists @guardian @bbc @DeGroene. Here’s their work:

bit.ly/3lUq4NR by @martinchulov
bbc.in/33e4Eoh and bbc.in/3oK93Yp by @chloehadj
bit.ly/3yeeGBs by @minkanijhuis @tjitskelingsma [26/42]

.@DeGroene is a Dutch weekly which last September published this story on disinformation and the White Helmets, in which it accused VK of contributing to a “fraud-frame”
groene.nl/artikel/we-wer… [27/42]

Slightly repetitive, but here’s what @DeGroene writes about VK. Compared to @derspiegel, it’s pretty mild. [28/42]

Still, VK’s editor-in-chief @klokpieter responded by sending De Groene’s editor-in-chief @xandraschutte an angry e-mail and threatening legal action. A few days later, VK filed a formal complaint with the Dutch Press Council. [29/42]

VK’s complaint revolves around the fact that De Groene didn’t contact VK prior to publication, which Klok calls “a mortal sin”. De Groene argues that doing so isn’t mandatory when commenting on an article already in the public domain. [30/42]

Whatever your position, VK preaching about the right to reply seems a bit rich given the way its own reporters practiced the principle: giving Le Mesurier’s widow 6 hours to reply, ignoring her 75 comments and getting back to her when the story was already out. [31/42]

Lest VK accuses me of not reaching out to them: I called and texted @esvanana multiple times when first reporting on this. She initially just ignored me and later replied that I’m not disposed to objective reporting and she’d prefer if I stopped contacting her. [32/42]

Aside from its aggressive response to its critics, VK has also been particularly insensitive in its communication with Emma Winberg, rather than showing some extra care vis-à-vis the grieving widow of the dead man whose reputation it trashed. [33/42]

In just one example, Winberg informs VK she wishes to file a complaint with the Press Council and asks the paper to reply within 2 days (note: not 6 hours), but is told later that her deadline is ‘infeasible’, in part because the paper is celebrating its 100th anniversary [34/42]

A lack of empathy also transpires in this article, in which VK promotes its own ‘scoop’ and asks Ana van Es if it was fun to “stir up the muck”. “Yes, you can put it like that”, she replies, saying it was “a sad story to write”, but one that had to be told. [35/42]

Christoph Reuter in @derspiegel puts it a tad differently: “it was nothing more than journalistic character assassination with a tinge of regret for how "sad" it was "to write a story with a main character who is dead.” [36/42]

So why do I take the time to write this monstrously long thread? Why does this matter? [37/42]

First, and going back to where we started, it matters because it’s a basic journalistic and human principle to report with extra care when you ruin the reputation of a dead person who cannot defend himself. VK did not. It rushed to the scoop it craved. [38/42]

Second, prior to De Groene’s article, VK’s reporting went largely unchallenged in the Netherlands. Many outlets, including my own @nrc, ran news stories that repeated its claims. While I didn’t write those myself, I do feel a responsibility to correct our mistakes. [39/42]

Third, by disregarding all criticism, refusing a conversation, badmouthing colleagues, threatening legal action and starting proceedings at the Press Council, VK undermines the spirit of uninhibited debate and (self-)examination that is essential to journalism. [40/42]

Fourth, while VK of course doesn’t control who circulates its article, it knew it was reporting in a context of a Russian and Syrian regime disinformation campaign against the White Helmets. [41/42]

Fifth and finally, it matters because VK also damaged the White Helmets themselves, who continue to save lives in Syria to this day. I end with this video of their response to a Russian/regime attack on Ariha last October, which killed 10 civilians. @SyriaCivilDef [42/42 - END]