Beate Schirrmacher, 'A Story Too Good to Be True: Manipulation of Truth Claims in Faked News'

This seminar is in English.

Note that the seminar with Nafiseh Mousavi originally scheduled on this day has been postponed. The new date will be added to the seminar calendar soon.

This week we will have Beate Schirrmacher presenting an article draft on A Story Too Good to Be True: Manipulation of Truth Claims in Faked News.

Abstract:

In 2018, former German star reporter Claas Relotius had to admit that he manipulated most of his prize-winning feature stories. So why did no one for a long time suspect that his stories were a bit too good to be true? Instead of trying to tell facts from fiction, the article explores how facts and narrative interact in the factual narratives of news. Drawing on Lars Elleström’s approach to how truthfulness in communication is based on indexicality (2018) the analysis looks for indexical traces of journalistic work in two features published in Der Spiegel: “Karam’s first day at school” by Alexander Osang (2018) and the manipulated feature “The story of Ahmed and Alin” by Claas Relotius (2016). The analysis explores how observed and verifiable details interact with elements of internal and external coherence. In Osang’s feature, the different indexical relations are closely connected yet clearly separated. Main events are grounded in several indexical relations. In Relotius’ manipulated feature, the different indexical relations are not easily identified, and elements of coherence point towards each other instead of being grounded in observed and verifiable detail. This kind of analysis makes it possible to start to describe more in detail how a factual narrative is truthfully or only deficiently grounded in actual events.  

You are welcome to join the seminar on zoom by emailing us at ims@lnu.se

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen