Word: stern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Journalistic and ethical standards at Stern and other publications that ballyhooed the Hitler diaries were denounced with new force last week on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps nowhere more fiercely than within Stern itself. Much of the 210-member editorial staff was obsessed with investigating the diaries fiasco. Others sought only to place the embarrassment behind them. Many called for the resignation of Henri Nannen, 69, who has been Stern's publisher since the magazine was founded in 1948. Others hinted that blame extends high into Stern's parent corporation, Gruner & Jahr, and even into the holding...
...chief. The magazine's management also returned $200,000 that had been paid by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for British and Commonwealth publication rights. The placatory efforts backfired. In a statement, some 200 editorial employees labeled the episode "a severe blow against 35 years of Stern credibility." About 100 staffers staged a sit-in at Stern's offices to protest the hiring of Gross and Scholl-Latour because their jobs would merge business and editorial control and because they supposedly would not sustain the magazine's liberal tradition...
...West Germany, leading journalists belittled Stern. Said Lothar Loewe, director of West Berlin's TV station SFB: "The whole affair is the result of checkbook journalism, of which Stern is the worst offender." In a front-page editorial in Hamburg's prestigious weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Editor Theo Sommer said, "When lightweights are combined with heavy money, the controlling responsibilities in journalism are easily lost...
Perhaps most chastening for all the publications was evidence that the forgeries were almost certainly perpetrated not by a cunning political conspiracy of Nazis or East German Communists but by a pedestrian crook. From the outset Stern editors insisted they had simply trusted a reporter who had been on the staff for 31 years. But as soon as historians and document experts started to question the authenticity of the diaries at a press conference on April 25, the Stern reporter, Gerd Heidemann, 51, dropped temporarily from sight. He was grilled privately by Stern editors, and last week he defended himself...
Still, there was circumstantial evidence that Fischer had penned the diaries. A companion, Edith Lieblang, had complained to friends that he was working "day and night" on a book about Hitler for Stern. In recent years, friends had noticed Fischer on a spending spree, buying, among other items, a house for 700,000 marks ($287,000) in cash...