Fact check: “Foreign press warns against German media”

What a newspaper is supposedly reporting is explosive: the press abroad should warn against German media because they would slander the AfD in particular.

The scanned article is shared on Facebook and Twitter:

There it says:

“The international journalists’ association “European Press Watch (EPW)” criticized “one-sided and misleading reporting” in a statement and announced that it would lower the credibility ranking of German media (…) by one point to 2.0.”

and

“The reason for this harsh measure, as Olaf Leifstroem, spokesman for the EU journalists, explains, is the reports in the leading German media on the citizen protests in Chemitz, which were classified as “unbalanced” and “distorting”. This not only “criminalises” permissible protest, but also “almost systematically slanders the German opposition party AfD.”

Where does this article come from?

The article first appeared on Twitter, published by an account with the well-known red cross in its name, a sign of protest by primarily right-wing users against the quality filtering function on Twitter.

The user has not yet responded to our request as to where this newspaper clipping came from. What was noticeable, however, was that the user was followed by both “Daily Fake News” accounts, an account whose fakes we have often dealt with. Of course, that alone isn't proof, but it gave us the idea to take a closer look at the article.

Fact check part 1 – The text

This is the first indication that we should find out more about the “European Press Watch”. We ourselves have never heard of this organization, but if it is so important that it creates international rankings for the credibility of journalism in individual countries, there must be something to be found about it.

That's quite disappointing.
The EPW isn't even mentioned in any article? Well, then let's take a look at the people named in the article, after all one of them is the president of the association and a journalist.

That's very disappointing. There is nothing to be found about two people, the name of the third person seems to appear at least in an old article from 1985. If Mr. Leifstroem is indeed a journalist, he must be incredibly unsuccessful.

At least the newspaper that Olaf Leifstroem supposedly works for almost . It's called " Svenska dagbladet ", not "Svenska dag e bladet". But in this case we'll be merciful and blame it on sloppiness. However, nothing about any of the three named people can be found directly in the search there.

Interim result:
The only people named and the organization they work for cannot be verified.

Fact check part 2 – The graphic

Our first glance is the logo of the “European Press Watch”.

The author's first thought is unadorned: “Are you fu***ng kidding me?”
The logo of this supposedly international organization looks like Word clipart ? Plus a character set that is more suitable for a lemonade stand at a kindergarten party? For a renowned association of international journalists, this is, to say the least, extremely sloppy and poorly inserted (light blue background of the “logo”, tattered on the left edge)

Interim result:
Someone didn't really feel like creating a credible logo and instead took the first word clipart that came across his or her path.

Fact check part 3 – The layout

At some points the work was extremely sloppy, which would not happen with any normal print medium, simply because of the programs used in editorial offices to be able to position the design with millimeter precision.
Of course you can do this with other programs, but the author of the article apparently didn't attach great importance to it... "surely no one will notice"? Incorrect. Us already.

Here you can see that the corner of the “Info” box was not cut cleanly. A piece is missing from the upper right corner, the black bar is longer than the gray text box below.

Here you can see that the white border of the comment box protrudes into the blue upper bar. Additionally, the black frame around the comment is not flush with the blue box above it.

What looks like the back showing through in the normal image appears to have actually been an unclean scanner, evident from the repeating pattern in the left image, which becomes visible when the contrast is increased.
You can also see in the picture on the right that there is a white gap between the article and the comment that shouldn't actually be there.

Last but not least, the forensic analysis shows that the article was probably based on a real newspaper (for example, the blue bar at the top was not changed), but that all text and images were replaced.

We were also able to notice minor inconsistencies in the layout, for example that the red underline of the heading is not flush with the letters, which suggests that the underline was made by hand.

Conclusion

The alleged newspaper article is completely fictional in terms of text, graphics and layout. The names of the people and the organization cannot be verified, the layout and the organization's "logo" are sloppily cobbled together and certainly do not correspond to the specifications and requirements of an international organization and a print medium.

According to our analysis, it is clearly a fake .