People were right in the previous discussion [0] to criticize Der Spiegel's self-serving sanctimonious tone in their writeup of the scandal. It's impossible to read the allegations by the Fergus Falls residents here and square them with Der Spiegel's purportedly high-performing fact-checking operation. It's not just only that they failed to detect their reporter's malicious deception. But they failed to do the most basic kind of fact-checking. For instance, I could see them failing to get to the bottom of an ephemeral fact like whether someone had put up a sign saying "Mexicans Keep Out". But calling the city to confirm that the official city sign says "Home of Damn Good Folks", and the theater to confirm that they were playing "American Sniper" in 2017? Those are the kind of facts that at a bare minimum professional fact-checkers should be double-checking.

Even something like the claim that the city administrator was a gun-toting virgin is something that a fact-checker is expected to call and independently confirm. And even if the guy gives a non-committal denial, e.g. "That's ridiculous, I don't want have anything to do with your left-wing fake news article!", the fact-checker should be prying the reporter for all the documentation/notes that support the claim. In fact, in this scenario, the fact-checker should be highly suspicious that the city official is so standoffish, if the reporter managed to gain his trust enough in the first place to reveal that he's a virgin (and is ostensibly embarrassed about it).

Der Spiegel has a lot of questions it has to answer for how it failed so thoroughly for so many years here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716613