On Friday, September 16, we published an article on tagesschau.de that contained errors. The author of the article was Jana Genth (SWR), correspondent at the ARD studio in Johannesburg. In short, the article was about an invention that doesn’t even exist.
After we had many doubts about the article and the statements of the “inventor”, Jana Genth asked us to put her article offline.
The correspondent explains:
“I fell for the pseudo-scientific explanations of the protagonist of my contribution. The Zimbabwean’s research has not been scientifically proven. It is likely that they will never be documented either, because they contradict physical principles. I sincerely apologize for the false report. It hits me deeply in my journalistic self-image and does not represent my ethos as a reporter.”
We at tagesschau.de very much regret that we have published a “duck” here. High quality standards for journalistic work are very important to us, and we assume that all correspondent reports that we publish have been checked in advance according to all basic journalistic rules. Now we are working together to further improve the processes.