Keywords

1 Introduction

In December 2018, Claas Relotius, a reporter at the German news magazine Der Spiegel, admitted that several of his prize-winning feature stories were partly or largely manipulated. Instead of factual narratives that referred to actual recent events, his texts were “beautifully narrated fiction… embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts” (Fichtner, 2018). Although the fraud appeared to be evident to many in hindsight, why did no one notice at the time that the features told stories that were a bit too good to be true? Former Spiegel journalist Stefan Niggemeyer points out how the ideal of the journalist as a storyteller cultivated at Der Spiegel motivates journalists to write the best possible story, which is not necessarily the most accurate one. Another aspect to consider is that Relotius wrote feature articles, a news genre that offers a more subjective perspective on events than news reports or breaking news. Therefore, every feature includes observations or experiences that fact-checking cannot wholly verify (Niggemeier, 2018).

How do we perceive a news story to be true? Publications of news outlets are read as factual narratives, based on trust and a tacit factual contract (Klein & Martínez, 2009, 3): The claim that their narratives about recent events are based on observation and research and provide verified public knowledge (Ekström & Westlund, 2019, 1). Journalistic falsifications like Relotius’s texts pose the question, how can one tell that this contract is upheld and its truth claims are honestly made? This question cannot be answered by trying to differentiate facts from fiction and information from invention. Instead, one must look deeper to explore how facts and narrative strategies work together in journalism to convey information. Therefore the question should be, how does a story stay truthful to the recent events it claims to report on?

This article explores the characteristics of truthful narration in journalism and how they can be manipulated. The article starts with presenting news as factual narratives and discusses authority and truth claims in journalism. Drawing on Lars Elleström’s approach to how truthfulness in communication is based on indexicality (2018), the analysis looks for the indexical traces of professional journalistic methods in two features published in Der Spiegel: Claes Relotius’s “The story of Ahmed and Alin” (2016), which created a huge reader response but also revealed massive manipulations (CR-Dokumentation, 2018) and a feature by Alexander Osang (2018). Both features are written by renowned writers, published in the same beat, “Gesellschaft” (“society”) and under the same topic “Schicksale” (“fates”). Both tell stories about children in a Middle East context. As the analysis explores how observed and verifiable details interact with elements of internal and external coherence in these two features, it becomes possible to describe more in detail how factual narrative is truthfully or insufficiently anchored in actual events.

2 News, Facts, and Fiction

News, understood as accounts about recent events has always been an essential part of human social life. In modern society, news is distributed by news outlets, produced by professional journalists that are “committed to reporting information that is new about the world” (Conboy, 2013, 2). Yet digitization has fundamentally transformed how news is produced, spread and consumed. Journalists are no longer the only ones who publicly tell accounts about recent events; they are increasingly challenged by alternative voices (Holt, 2020). As a reaction to this transformation, journalists and journalism research express more explicitly the basic principles of journalistic practice and the sources of journalistic authority (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014; Carlson, 2017). Journalists strive to be more transparent about why they can claim to provide “truthful and verified information” (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014, 33). However, stressing journalism as a knowledge-producing institution also draws attention to the tensions between the ideal and a less perfect practice (Carlson, 2017, 36) and to how journalists have to balance the obligation to truth and the need to sell an exciting story. The study of how journalists and news providers establish and claim to provide relevant knowledge has long been a core interest in journalism studies. Yet, this study is often impeded by binary thinking, where news either collects or constructs the facts; it either informs about or constructs reality (Broersma, 2010; Ekström & Westlund, 2019; Godler et al., 2020).

One way to overcome this binary thinking is to explore news as factual narratives, where the construction is informed by its reference to actual events (Klein & Martínez, 2009; Fludernik & Ryan, 2020). Journalistic narration is based on a “factual pact” between journalists and their audience, the assurance that news should make “statements about the real world” (Fludernik, 2020, 62). Linguists explore news as a distinctive narrative genre (Fowler, 2001) with a specific discourse (van Dijk, 1988). News forms complex multimodal narratives that integrate texts and images (see, for instance, Bednarek & Caple, 2012) as well as visual and sound-based modes (Bietz, 2013), and it increasingly employs transmedia storytelling strategies that span across different platforms (Rampazzo Gambarato & Tárcia, 2017). The new and flexible choices to integrate words, images, and sounds in online communication that can be shared across different platforms all have narratological consequences (Renner, 2018, 147–48).

Journalists use narrative strategies as tools to convey information and provide understanding, yet the narrative strategies are not always prominent, and the balance between information and narration is different depending on the news outlets and genres. In news reports, the narrative mediation is often barely noticed, as journalists focus on conveying the facts. Still, even news reports and breaking news represent events in a meaningful order (Renner, 2020). These subtle narrative patterns become noticeable when comparing the reports of different news outlets on the same event (Renner, 2012). In news features, narrative strategies and storytelling are more explicit, as the aim of feature journalism is not only to inform but to let the audience experience events of the recent past (Renner, 2020, 470). Cecilia Aare points out that narrative strategies and voice are not meant to convey the reporter’s personal experience. Instead, narrative strategies are used to assert professional engagement and create empathy for the experiences of others (2021, 18–19). While the reporter’s presence at the site of events and meetings with people are essential parts of the research, the reporter’s role as an eyewitness is not always prominent in the text of the feature. The narrative stance as an eye-witness of events is only one of several narrative stances that Aare identifies. The reporter’s presence at the site can even be downplayed or entirely removed in the text. Furthermore, reporters sometimes reconstruct events they have not been present to and give voice to the experience of others (ibid., 203–241).

To create empathy and engagement, journalistic storytelling also draws on narrative strategies more familiar from fiction. Especially the style of so-called New, Literary, or Narrative Journalism advocates for imaginative use of language and the use of the subjective perspective (Vanoost, 2013, 77; see also Wolfe 1973). Still, in the factual context of journalism, such strategies have to be used differently. For example, although reconstructed scenes are frequently used in contemporary feature writing, they have to be marked in some way (Aare, 2021, 214), as the border between actual events and narrative construction easily blurs (Dernbach, 2015, 312).

However, according to the journalistic pact, all news features are read as factual narratives until proven otherwise. Looking at the narrative structure alone is therefore insufficient to answer whether the narrative remains truthful to actual events. Yet journalistic narratives are anchored in journalistic research, Aare points out, and the eye-witness perspective should impact the text’s narrativity to some extent (Aare, 2021, 15). While narratology has yet to develop the tools to explore how truth claims are asserted (Strässle, 2019, 39), Thomas Strässle has identified certain characteristics of how they are manipulated. “Faketional” narratives present fictive events in a factual context: Instead of conveying information, they strive to create resonance; instead of drawing on evidence, they draw on plausibility; and instead of informing, the text displays information gaps (2019).

Some important hints about the claims of factuality come from legal narratology. In the courtroom, factual and faketional narratives on the same event are told, and the task of the judges and juries is to decide which of them appears to be most truthful to the actual events. Thus, when legal narratology has explored characteristics of factual storytelling in court, research highlights how a credible and convincing narrative in court has to relate to the facts of the evidence but also needs to create coherence with a plausible plot. In addition, the narratives have to appeal to audience expectations, tie into existing macro-narratives (Kjus, 2010, 194) and concur with common-sense rules about “how things usually are” (Wagenaar et al., 1993). Thus, legal narratology indicates how truthful factual narration is not just about sticking to the facts. Instead, truthful factual narration should be traced in the relationship between fact, narrative, and pre-existing experience.

3 The Truth Claims of Media and the Perception of Truthfulness

The next step to explore how facts, narrative, and pre-existing experiences interact in a truthful way in journalistic factual narratives, is to look at the truth claims of news. Tom Gunning describes how all media products draw on truth claims, as they provide reasons why and how we should trust certain kinds of media products such as news reports or photographs. These truth claims are not inherent properties of a media product but a claim that is “based on our understanding of its inherent properties” (Gunning, 2004, 42), on the production but also the perception of the media product. For instance, the truth claims of a photograph as indexical proof of what and who has been present at a certain time and place are grounded in the production process of photographs but also informed by the detailed iconicity of the photographic image (ibid., 45).

In journalism, the truth claim of production involves the claim to be based on research and observation, the “necessary conditions for any news story to be accepted as a legitimate account of an event” as Matt Carlson (2017, 6) puts it. This truth claim of production is supported by practices of verification as well as the use of eyewitness accounts and reliable sources. Perceptional truth claims are made by using a specific visual and narrative form (ibid., 50–93) and the use of a neutral voice in news (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2014, 103).

However, we need parameters to decide whether truth claims are sincerely made. Fakes in particular, only draw on the truth claims of production in a rhetorical way without being grounded in the production process. (Gunning, 2004, 42). To define such parameters, I draw on Lars Elleström’s approach to truthfulness in communication (2018). According to Elleström, truthfulness is established via indexical signs. Indexical signs point toward the presence of something else based on “contiguity, or real connections” (ibid., 424). For example, a footprint is a trace of previous presence, and a rash is a symptom of illness. In addition, even primarily conventional signs such as words or iconic signs such as images indexically point towards acts that have been carried out to produce them.

The following analysis of two feature stories from Der Spiegel therefore distinguishes elements that can be read as traces of the professional work of journalists, elements that confirm the truth claims of the production in journalism. The analysis distinguishes between the presentation of an event (defined as a change of situation) and how this event is specified using

  • Observed and experienced details (as indices for someone’s presence on site)

  • Verifiable details (as indices for research and expertise)

These elements are part of what Elleström calls external truthfulness in communication (ibid., 437); they form a “real connection” between the news feature as a media product, the events that have taken place and the reporter’s research that has been carried out. However, Elleström explains that indexical signs can also point toward the existence of other indices and thus form “real connections” between signs in the form of chains and webs of intracommunicational coherence (ibid., 436). Pronouns such as “he,” “she,” and “it” indexically point to names and nouns mentioned before, just as fragments point towards the (previous) existence of a whole. Therefore the analysis also searches for the way how the journalist as narrator structures and evaluates the events and connects new events to the previous knowledge of the expected audience.

  • Rhetoric and narrative patterns that provide internal coherence

  • External Coherence with audience’s pre-existing experiences

None of these four elements alone is sufficient to evaluate the truthfulness of a media product. Observed details can be faked, verifiable details might not add relevant context, narrative coherence can provide plausibility to fictive events and coherence with pre-existing experience appeals to confirmation bias. The analysis therefore explores how these four categories support and vouch for each other. With this analytical framework, it becomes possible to describe more specifically how and when a story is truthfully or only insufficiently anchored in the event it claims to inform about.

4 Alexander Osang: “K.’s First Day at School”

Here and in the following, the names of private individuals have been anonymized.

The feature “K.’s first day at school” (Osang, 2018) deals with how people in Gaza are affected by Donald Trump’s Middle East politics. The feature tells the story of 7-year-old K.S. and his family. K.’s first day at school is used as a frame to connect different substories that are either retold (the story of the S. family, the story of UNRWA leader Matthias Schmale), researched (USA’s UN Ambassador Nikki Hayley’s story), or observed on-site (Gazans protest against unemployment). The journalist’s on-site presence is not very prominent, using Aare’s terminology, it appears reduced but not completely retouched out of the text, as there are instances of perceptions and thoughts of the reporter on site, and a specific scene at the S. family’s home describes the observations of and interaction with a visitor that is not explicitly mentioned (ibid., 50–51). These different substories contextualize each other, and in each narrative strand, a person’s life story connects with a story based on the journalist’s observations and research. Together the stories form a network of different perspectives on life in Gaza.

4.1 Observed and Verifiable Details: Events Grounded in External Truthfulness

The analysis of indexical relationships reveals a specific pattern. Throughout the feature article, nearly every new change of situation is immediately supported by at least one, often two, different indexical relationships.

Often, events are anchored in both observed and verifiable details. This pattern can be seen in the lead:

School has started in Gaza, but this time there is a lack of US aid. This is part of Donald Trump’s new Middle East politics. (ibid., 50).

When K. participates in a political demonstration, the event is anchored with the same pattern:

[K.] waved the flag. He laughs when he tells this. < > Further away, at the fence, many people died. (ibid.)

Observed and verifiable details do not have to align. K.’s laughter and the death of protesters form a contrast (< >). K. is presented as the source of information about the demonstration, and his laughter testifies to his experience of the event, which contrasts with the verifiable details about the Friday demonstrations. The rhetorical contrast contributes to narrative coherence in spite of the contradictory relation between verifiable facts and the eye-witness experience. The frequent connection of observed and verifiable details anchors the described events in the professional journalistic work that relies on observing and expertise (Carlson, 2017, 42). Together, the combination of observed and verifiable details place the event in a relevant context that remains truthful to specific events.

Observed details that are mentioned often appear to be incongruous with the audience’s pre-existing experience; K.’s laugh when he talks about the protest and a sit-in protest in front of the UNRWA “on plastic chairs” are unexpected details, as they do not correspond with generic ideas about protests organized as marches. Neither would the audience expect a 7-year-old Gazan to ask the German chancellor for help as K. does in a letter to Angela Merkel (Osang, 2018, 54). The letter is both quoted and verified by a photograph (ibid., 51) and so are the verbal descriptions of interviewees like A.S. (ibid., 52) and Matthias Schmale (ibid., 53). Thus, the same objects and phenomena appear in different versions, as observed details in the text and as verifiable details in the form of photographs.

4.2 Coherence: Narrative Coherence Anchored in External Truthfulness

Elements of internal coherence, such as narrative commentary, rhetorical or narrative patterns, appear in the feature closely connected to observed or verifiable details, as in the following passage, where the observed detail of K.’s age backs up and offers an argument for why the narrative tool of focalization (a narrator’s access to another person’s thoughts and feelings) remains truthful to K.’s apprehension of the situation.

K. did not one-hundred percent understand what it all had to do with him. He is seven years old.

Contrasts are used to effectively demonstrate the relationship between observed and verifiable details, or between observed details and pre-existing knowledge (see below). In the following passage verifiable details also vouch that a rhetorical contrast remains truthful to the events:

In the summer, there were summer camps < > and bomb attacks that the Israeli air force used to avenge the burning paper dragons, which the Palestinians allowed to sail on their fields. (ibid., 50)

“Bomb attacks” in this sentence form a rhetorical contrast, the antithesis of “summer camps.” This contrast is backed up by verified details from previous news reports from Gaza. Figures of speech appear in the form of comparisons that are backed up by specific or verifiable details elsewhere in the text. For example, when the UNRWA is described as “something like Gaza’s tree of life,” this comparison is backed up by a specific observation of a mural of a life-giving tree on the UNRWA building (ibid., 50). The comparison is part of the motif of hope against all odds. However, this aspect of narrative discourse is backed up by a specific quote by Matthias Schmale, where the leader of the UNRWA explains that his belief in hope stems from his experience of the fall of apartheid in South Africa and of the Berlin Wall (ibid., 52). Thus, this specific quote provides an argument for why hope against all odds might not seem naive but here is grounded in lived experience.

4.3 External Coherence in Contrast to Specific Events

Even the appeal to the pre-existing experience of the German-speaking audience appears in contrast to observed details. The description of Matthias Schmale is based on a stereotype, the typical social science teacher. However this stereotype is used to challenge other pre-existing ideas of the audience, including generic ideas about leaders of international organizations:

You are surprised when you meet Matthias Schmale for the first time. He looks like a social science teacher. Jeans; belly; unruly hairdo of little white hair; bright, soft laughter; a silver ring on the wrist.

As the stereotype of a social science teacher is supported by observed details and made verifiable by a photograph, all four indexical relationship are used to present the portrait of Matthias Schmale in the feature as truthful and coherent. However, the appeal to German pre-existing experiences often appears in contrast to observed details, for instance after a quote from protesting Gazans who feel let down by the UNRWA:

“Matthias steals the smiles from the faces of the children of Gaza.” The sentence echoes in the mind like a line from a children’s song by Rolf Zuckowski. (ibid., 52)

The contrast between an optimistic vision of childhood typical for children’s songs and the observed details of everyday life in Gaza with no future prospects is a narrative tool to create understanding and empathy. There are more examples of songs that create contrasts. For instance, the sentence, “It was a long, tough summer,” (ibid., 50) evokes the 1983 Bananarama hit “Cruel Summer” and forms an ironic contrast between the song about teenage despair and the numbers of deaths and injuries published by the Health Ministry in Gaza that the following sentence refers to. The contrasts, comparisons, and appeals to pre-existing experience add evaluation, explanation, and discursive framing. However, these internal and external coherence elements are always supported by observed and verifiable details. Together, they vouch that the journalistic storytelling remains grounded in the work of the reporter on site and that the story remains truthful to the events.

5 Claas Relotius’s “The Story of Ahmed and Alin”

The feature “Königskinder” (Relotius, 2016) tells “The story of Ahmed and Alin. Two Syrian orphans trapped in Turkey” as the title of the international English version of the article sums up. Der Spiegel’s retroactive fact check of Relotius’s articles revealed that the feature was mostly invented: Relotius and his photographer Emin Özmen did, in fact, meet a boy named Ahmed in Turkey. According to Özmen, the boy Ahmed in the feature appears to be “composed from the stories of other children” (CR-Dokumentation, 132). The feature is built out of scenes where the presence of a journalist has been completely removed, and interviewees are quoted as talking to someone whose presence on site at a specific moment or place is never clearly discernible. While the reporter in this feature appears not to be on site, the journalist is more present in the text as a narrative voice that retells the stories the children have told him “at different times, different places” (ibid., 128). The stories include reconstructed scenes and intradiegetic stories within stories in the form of fantasies, dreams, and hearsay. The story of Nasser, Alin’s employer, is the only story that does not include an additional intradiegetic level. The feature tells stories about people, but they are not explicitly connected to stories about the world and politics. Turkey’s president Erdoğan and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are mentioned, but no narrative thread explains how their political decisions affect the situation of Syrian child refugees. The stories do not form a network of public and individual stories; instead, they nest into each other.

5.1 Lack of Verifiable Details

The internal coherence of narrative discourse is very prominent in the feature.

This pattern can be observed in the lead:

Ahmed and Alin were ten and eleven years old when their parents die in Aleppo. They flee to Turkey and work here, separated from each other, as a scrap collector and seamstress. (N2) Sometimes, in dreams, Angela Merkel appears to them. (ibid., 127)

Observed details appear interspersed in the presentation of the event. Verifiable details that refer to previous news reports are absent. Instead, a second intradiegetic level (N2) connects the children’s stories with a key figure in EU migration politics in an unexpected manner, as the audience would not likely expect child workers to dream of Angela Merkel. Even in the following paragraphs of the feature, observed details are not supported by verifiable details. Instead, the described scene is followed by the intradiegetic story of Alin’s song.

5.2 Internal Coherence Between Observed Details

Throughout the feature, observed details are interspersed in the narration and support coherence between narrated events, as in the first sentences:

One early morning this summer, Alin, a girl with tired eyes, 13 years old, walks alone through the dark streets of the city of Mersin and sings a song. (ibid.)

In his narratological analysis of this feature, Samuli Björninen draws attention to how emotion and sensory perception create an experiential narrative instead of vouching for the journalist’s presence as an eye-witness (2019, 363). Here, the word choice “tired” to describe her outer appearance already shifts the focus to Alin’s inner experience. This focus on experience instead of observation can also be seen in how internal coherence between the details creates a scene. The details do not so much provide specific information about a specific morning at a specific place. Instead, every detail is internally coherent with “one early morning” and externally coherent with “how things usually are” in early mornings: People are tired, streets are dark, and others are still asleep. This coherence with pre-existing experiences covers certain inconsistencies. Why, one might ask, do the dogs on the street remain “still asleep” although Alin passes them singing and with “clattering sandals” (CR-Dokumentation, 127)? Even when specific details are mentioned, such as the 15 steps down to the sweatshop (ibid.), they are not easy to verify, as no verifiable names of places are given. Specific details, like the plastic chairs and wooden tables in the sweat shop (ibid.) are coherent with the generic ideas of sweatshops as cheap and makeshift. Taken together, the observed details in the feature are more plausible than specific, which corresponds with Strässle’s observations about the faketional. In fact, the details display the characteristics of what Roland Barthes has called the effet de réel, details that evoke a realistic impression of a fictional world. The details of a fictional world are more iconic than indexical, “created to imitate familiar reality,” as Christer Johansson puts it (2021, 26). And as the effet de réel, the details in Relotius’s feature add familiar, not unexpected, details to the described scenes. The reader does not get a specific description of Ahmed and Alin’s outward appearance. Instead, the children are described by their preferences and values: Alin liked homework and learned how to cook from her mother, Ahmed liked football and biking “more than praying” (CR-Dokumentation, 128). These descriptions are in fact internal characterizations that are externally coherent to expected gender roles and describe the children before they left home; they do not sum up details observed by the journalist himself and cannot be anchored in verified details like photographs. One photograph shows a pair of dirty hands (ibid., 127), which does not connect to Ahmed’s description in the text stating that Ahmed has “jug ears.” The photograph of a girl was provided by Relotius and not the photographer (ibid., 133), so no other person can vouch for the claim that it represents Alin, the girl with “tired eyes” (ibid., 127), nor does the text of the feature claim this. The specific details shown in the photograph, are not used to verify specific details in the text. Instead, text and images appear to fill each other’s gaps.

5.3 Events Verified by Intradiegetic Stories

The feature tells stories of people that tell stories. Instead of anchoring the events in observed and verifiable details, the narrated events are anchored in intradiegetic stories: Alin’s story includes fantasies, dreams, hearsay, and overheard stories. A contextual event, the explosion of a car-bomb in Gaziantep, is mentioned as an overheard rumor and is therefore not a verifiable detail, even though the place and casualties are specified, with “2 casualties, 22 injured.” In the description of an alleged car-bomb, the elements that are structurally presented as additional specifications are internally coherent and point indexically towards previous information.

In Gaziantep, ← were Ahmed lives, a bomb is said to have went off. A car, ← loaded with explosives, was driven to the front of a police station…. The driver of the car, it was said, was a young Syrian,←underage, ← still a child. (ibid., 130)

No verifiable details are added to confirm Alin’s story. Even events that can be verified, such as Angela Merkel’s visit to Gaziantep (ibid., 129), is neither described as observed on site nor verified by its date on April 23, 2016. The story of Ahmed includes intradiegetic levels via photos and videos on his smartphone. He shows the video of an execution scene that is not verifiable nor specific but provides generic details of numerous ISIS execution videos (ibid., 128). The actions of ISIS and Western politicians provide relevant context to the children’s experiences. However, context is not added by the reporter but it is only present in “found” fragments of context, integrated into the stories and films that the children show and tell.

The most elaborative intradiegetic story is explicitly fictive. Alin’s folk song tells the story of two children who lose everything but are rescued in the end. The song provides internal coherence as a mise-en-abyme that mirrors the siblings’ situation (Björninen, 2019, 365). The paraphrase of the lyrics is detailed but repeats generic phrasing (“Once upon a time,” “a realm far away”) and generic narrative patterns of fairy tales (“now they are king and queen”). The song is more internally coherent and it connects the title “Königskinder” (“Royal children”) with the text of the feature rather than a specific observed detail (CR-Dokumentation, 127).

5.4 Colliding Truth Claims: Authenticity and Authority

As the analysis demonstrated above, the observed details are more generic than specific and verifiable details are absent. As a consequence, the text cannot establish journalistic authority. The truth claims made are thus not grounded in observation and expertise. Instead, the text draws on the alleged authenticity of the naïve child’s perspective, a claim that is supported by “metanarrative overcompensation” (Björninen, 2019, 367) when the narrator ensures that the children tell their stories:

In simple words, sometimes loud and sometimes silent, sometimes trembling and sometimes dumb, as lively and truthful as only children can tell. (CR-Dokumentation,128)

The narrator tells the stories of the children more in his words than in theirs. When the narrator explicitly claims that the children are truthful rather than showing specific details that would prove this claim, the text is grounded solely in the institutional authority of a narrator. In Osang’s feature (2018, 54), running and shouting are examples of K.’s spontaneous, age-appropriate behavior. In Relotius’s feature, vagueness and incoherence are presented as characteristics of an authentic child’s perspective. The children’s perspective is also presented as the reason for why political and verifiable context only appear in fragments. The following passage contextualizes by enumerating what children are not aware of:

Ahmed and Alin do not know anything about refugee quotas. They don’t know anything about Turkey, of a president called Erdoğan or of a refugee agreement with the EU. All they know is they are not allowed to go back to Syria because it is too dangerous there and that they are not allowed to move to another country because the other countries do not want them.(CR-Dokumentation, 130)

In this passage, the authorial claims of the narrator who knows about the inner life of characters are not supported by specific quotes from the children. The internal coherence of parallelisms covers inconsistencies: Ahmed and Alin work for their living and have smartphones without knowing the name of the country they work in? And even if they did not know, the journalist’s job would be to put this into the context of verifiable events and details that connect the experience of people with a story about the world. The children’s alleged ignorance is not consistent if taken as specific details about real people. However, ignorance and mistakes are familiar authenticity markers that construct the experience of authenticity in general (Enli, 2015) and the inconsistency between a focalized child’s perspective and the reader’s contextual knowledge is frequently used in literary texts to present the experience of war and conflict (Borčak, 2016).

Thus, what is presented as specific details of the stories of specific people points to a coherent narrative discourse. When Alin imagines Europe as “a little island, surrounded by the sea, ‘somewhere in the North’,” (CR-Dokumentation, 130) and dreams of Angela Merkel as “a young woman in a white robe, skin soft as soap and long golden hair,” (ibid.) these quotes are difficult to prove as false because they are presented as imagined. Although improbable as quotes, they are externally coherent with utopian and fairy tale discourses. They also create internal coherence as metaphors. Europe appears as unreachable as the mythological Ultima Thule, and Angela Merkel is presented as a benevolent fairy, based on her status as the white hope during the so-called migration crisis in 2015. But the metaphors are not presented explicitly as part of the narrator’s commentary. The narrator’s commentary is not used to explain the unfamiliar but used to correct inconsistencies and confirms only what the audience already knows, for example, that Angela Merkel wears pant suits (and not a fairy tale dress).

5.5 Coherence Replaces Specific and Verifiable Time and Place

Coherence replaces specificity in several other ways as well. The lack of specific dates makes it easy to miss the chronological inconsistencies, Der Spiegel’s fact check noted (ibid., 131). A phrase like “a summer’s day, two years ago” involves some temporal detail, but it is geared towards the audience’s here and now. While there are few specific dates, the text draws on the coherence of cyclical time patterns. For instance, Alin is said to sew by day, and Ahmed collects scrap metal by night (ibid., 129). We know that night follows day, but is the night the best time for collecting scrap metal? At one moment in the description of Alin’s working day, the narrator switches to the future tense (ibid., 127 f.). What looks like telling the story from a specific moment is a tool of iterative narration, which tells once what happens many times (and thus can be predicted). Unclear time frames lead to the merging of scenes, like when Ahmed returns to the hut in the early morning and the cooking fire blends into the following bonfire scene at night (ibid., 129)—which should be working time for Ahmed.

5.6 External Coherence, Recognition Effects

Explaining new events with reference to pre-existing experiences is a key strategy in journalism that enables both understanding and empathy (Aare, 2021, 19). However, in Relotius’s feature, the situation for child workers in Turkey is not only compared to life in Germany but presented as familiar, similar, and recognizable for the German audience. The Muslim girl Alin, who fasts during Ramadan (CR-Dokumentation, 130), is said to “fold her hands” to pray (ibid., 128), a Western and Christian gesture. The children are said to have escaped from Aleppo in the luggage compartment of a car (ibid.), a description that reverberates with GDR flight narratives. Smartphones are key devices for migrants in the twenty-first century, and in the feature, they provide internal coherence between different sites and stories. Still, their key importance collides with other details; Ahmed is said to live in a makeshift shed without electricity, and Alin has barely any money for food after paying the rent.

Another pattern of internal and external coherence is established in the German title. The title “Königskinder” (“Royal children”) evokes a well-known German folk ballad, a version of the myth of Hero and Leander about “two royal children” that “held each other dear” and “they could not meet each other” because “the water was far too deep.”Footnote 1 The ballad is never explicitly mentioned, but the lyrics resonate throughout the feature, like when the siblings “cannot see and meet each other.” The evoked ballad creates internal coherence in the form of a family likeness between the siblings’ situation, Alin’s folk song and stories of refugees that try to cross the water and—like Leander—drown in the attempt. The folk song does not provide a new understanding but confirms pre-existing knowledge of actual events, of refugees that drown in the Mediterranean Sea.

6 Conclusion

This comparative analysis between two news features is only a first step and needs to be supported by more extensive studies. Still, it can be stated that extracommunicational truthfulness and intracommunicational coherence integrate differently in ways that cannot be explained solely by stylistic differences.

In Osang’s feature, different indexical relationships back each other up but remain clearly distinguishable. Together, observed and verifiable details anchor events as truthfully grounded in journalistic work based on observation and expert knowledge. Observed or verifiable details anchor narrative coherence and pre-existing experience, and together these details vouch that the story is told in a way that remains truthful to actual events. There is a clearly discernible narrative voice and evaluative discourse, but they are anchored in observable or verifiable detail. Together these elements build an argument for the claim of factuality.

In Relotius’s feature, the absence of verifiable detail is striking. Details are not specific enough to be connected to an exact place and moment in time, and they are never verifiable. Instead, details are hedged; they claim to refer to the past or to hearsay, to images and films that are described but not shown. Details are presented as part of a subjective experience that can be vague, wrong, and outdated but difficult to prove as false. The details indexically point back to previous information or externally confirm pre-existing knowledge. Although this text claims to be a news feature, the stories of people do not explain the more abstract stories about the world. Instead, the narrated events are coherent because of how the audience expects things to be. The narrative voice does not draw on the observer’s testimony and the researcher’s work. Instead, the narrative voice demands that the reader simply trust the narrator’s authority.

Both features use similar narrative tools and even employ the same sort of details. They both evoke songs and draw on the children’s perspective. Angela Merkel appears as a key figure in the migration discourse after 2015, but details and coherence integrate differently. The detail of a plastic chair can add surprising information about a specific moment in time, or it can create coherence with previous generic knowledge. The appeal to pre-existing experiences, such as an evoked song, can help understand the new and unfamiliar and create empathy for an unfamiliar situation. However, the appeal to previous knowledge can lead the audience to accept what otherwise would be hard to believe. For instance, an evoked song can frame the new event as a repetition of already told familiar stories. Both features work with the same building blocks, but the indexical relationships integrate differently. The rhetorical and narrative strategies in Osang’s feature appear deeply integrated with verification, but in Relotius’s text, they are almost totally disconnected. Both build rhetorical arguments for the claim of factuality, but the differences lie in their strategies.

Looking at the differences between the two features, it appears, on the one hand, surprising that Relotius’s manipulations went undetected for such a long time. Relotius’s narrative may be compelling, but it is not anchored in verification, as it should be in every piece of journalism. A closer inspection provides more understanding about why Relotius’s manipulations did not cause more suspicion and reaction. On the surface, the features comply with the perceptional truth claims of journalism, but the relationship between details and coherence is inverted. Details that should point toward a specific event are instead indices that point toward other details. Incoherent fragments of context appear where the journalist’s work should provide coherence. A recollection of familiar elements replaces an understanding of the unfamiliar and the specific situation. Details that work like metaphors trigger recognition effects, hiding the fact that the narrative is not truthfully grounded in actual, specific events that tell something new about the complex reality.

Thus, the analysis of indexical relationships provides parameters for a more specific description of whether a factual narrative is truthfully grounded in actual events. The factual and the faketional features differ in the way they anchor the narrative in verified facts. In this analysis, the difference between a factional and a faketional text is striking. Analyzing the integration of facts, narrative and audience appeal can help to more objectively describe the informative narratives strategies of news reports or breaking news and help to identify risk factors for when and how the balance between truthful and engaging narration is disturbed.