Michael Born (journalist)

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Michael Born (born July 30, 1958 in Lahnstein ; † March 4, 2019 in Graz , Austria ) was a German television journalist. Born became known in 1996 as "Film Forger" and " Kujau des Fernsehens" after many of his alleged documentaries , which he had delivered for the television magazines Stern TV , Spiegel TV Magazin , ZAK and others, had been exposed as forgeries .

Life

The trained ship officer worked as a journalist in crisis areas in the 1980s.

After Born had provided real war reports with archival footage of explosions in his films for television magazines, he noticed that this material was only examined very superficially. He then used this method more and more frequently. Born showed children who allegedly knotted carpets for IKEA as child slaves in India , or a Ku Klux Klan meeting in the German Eifel , which he had only staged with friends. Born justified his approach by pointing out that at the beginning, the focus was not on having fun counterfeiting, but on worrying about your own safety and journalistic zeal. He claimed to have received sensitive information about illegal child labor in India or drug smuggling routes into the European Union. Documenting these incidents in real life seemed so dangerous to him that he decided to simply "recreate" what he believed to be true events. Over time, their audacity apparently increased until it was finally unmasked because, according to police reports, the voice of the alleged Ku Klux Klan speaker was 60 percent likely to be identical to the voice of the alleged drug courier from Guadeloupe. The public prosecutor's office then persuaded one of Born's employees to make a comprehensive confession and charged Born.

The then editor-in-chief of stern TV Günther Jauch defended himself during his interrogation against the accusation of lack of care on the grounds that he had basically never been in an editing room. Stern TV then changed its personnel policy. Until then, they had mainly relied on freelancers and suppliers, but now a permanent editorial team with permanent employees has been set up.

Trial and detention

In the trial before the Koblenz Regional Court , Michael Born justified himself with the media system, which was fixed on ratings, and accused the negligent editors of essential complicity in his forgeries. The prosecution charged him with 32 falsified documents , 16 of which could be proven. The court convicted Born in December 1996 of committed fraud in 17 cases and attempted fraud in three cases to four years' imprisonment. For some of the other films, the court recognized complicity or the commission by the broadcasters involved.

According to the Berliner Zeitung , no law prohibits the misleading of viewers, and the sentence - four years imprisonment - was therefore based on other offenses, including driving without a license, illegal possession of weapons, forgery of documents and sedition.

In 1997 Born left the Wittlich correctional facility as an outdoor prisoner . From 2002 he lived in Greece .

Born on March 4th, 2019, died in Graz , where he had lived with director and filmmaker Roland Berger for the past few months and worked with him on a theater project called Born to fake .

Fonts

  • Michael Born: Whoever fakes ... - The story of a television journalist. With an afterword by Volker Lilienthal . Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3462026674 .

literature

  • Martin Doll: Counterfeit and fake. On the discourse-critical dimension of deception. Kadmos, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3865991409 , pp. 349-358.
  • Thomas Pritzl: The fake factor. Searching for clues in the largest case of fraud on German television. kopäd, 2006, ISBN 3-938028-69-6 .
  • Matthias Junge : Grimme Prize for Michael Born. In: Heide Baumann, Clemens Schwender (Hrsg.): Kursbuch Neue Medien. A reality check. DVA, Stuttgart, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-421-05319-7 , pp. 178-197.
  • Johannes Hof: Information Society and Development of Democracy - From Media Democracy to Internet Democracy? Diploma thesis from the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart. PDF; 3.4 MB, accessed June 15, 2013.
  • Kay Hoffmann: The Documentary Image in the Age of Digital Manipulation. In: ders. (Ed.): Trau-Schau-Wem. Digitization and documentary form. UVK Medien, Konstanz 1997, pp. 13-28 (PDF).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michael Born died in Graz. In: Kleine Zeitung , March 5, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
  2. ↑ Werner A. Perger: Among forgers. In: Die Zeit , February 2, 1996, accessed June 15, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b c The pictures from the television of lies. In: NDR , 2011, Panorama reporter A. Reschke in an interview with Michael Born, accessed on June 15, 2013.
  4. ↑ Burkhard Strassmann: Well counterfeiting is half the battle. In: Die Zeit , February 2, 1996, accessed June 15, 2013; Marika Schaertl, Günther Bähr, Uli Martin: Absurd theater. In: Focus , February 5, 1996, accessed June 15, 2013.
  5. ↑ https://www.t-online.de/unterhaltung/stars/id_88189640/-wer-wird-millionaer-moderator-ueber-diesen-skandal-schweigt-guenther-jauch-.html
  6. ↑ Volker Lilienthal : The witness Günther Jauch in the film forger trial. In: Die Zeit , November 1, 1996, accessed June 15, 2013.
  7. ↑ W. Timpe: We are victims - Günther Jauch saw, checked and broadcast the falsified contributions by Michael Born - but others are supposed to be guilty. In: The Week , October 25, 1996.
  8. ↑ Behind the scenes. The topics please! In: Stern TV , accessed June 15, 2013.
  9. ↑ Gisela Friedrichsen : Me at work, so to speak. In: Der Spiegel , September 23, 1996, accessed June 15, 2013.
  10. ↑ Real: TV counterfeiters should pay four years. In: taz.de . December 24, 1996.
  11. ↑ Oliver Gehrs: Why the TV forger Michael Bonn is going to Hollywood soon. In: berliner-zeitung.de . October 6, 1997.
  12. ↑ Oliver Gehrs: Why the TV forger Michael Born is going to Hollywood soon: Born in the USA. In: berliner-zeitung.de. October 6, 1997, accessed July 9, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Born, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German television journalist
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Lahnstein
DATE OF DEATH 4th March 2019
Place of death Graz