The Real Reason Why So Many Career Liars Get Away With It For So Long

Dwi Hartanto was heralded as something of a genius. The Indonesian aeronautics expert claimed that he was involved in the development of next-gen fighter jets for companies like Airbus and Eurofighter. He told local media that he was routinely contacted for his expertise by national space agencies like NASA, JAXA, and the ESA. It was all enough for some journalists to dub Dwi "the next Habibie"—after the former president and aerospace engineer.

Last week, we learned that it was all a lie. Dwi claimed to have graduated from a fancy university in Tokyo. Turns out he went to a relatively unknown university in Yogyakarta. He said he was a professor and a post-doctoral student at the Netherlands' Delft University of Technology. He wasn't. In reality, he's still working toward his PhD. He told the press he won research technology competitions in Germany. He didn't. He bragged about patenting some kind of "lethal weapon in the sky." It doesn't exist. This list seriously goes on and on. You can read his full mea culpa here.

The story highlights a bigger problem Indonesia's facing: the country is full of fakes trying to peddle made-up success stories as real. There was I Wayan Sutawan, the Balinese villager who made headlines with his invention of a "bionic" hand that you could control with your brain (it didn't work), an Aceh resident who claimed to be able to produce electricity from a fruit tree (they couldn't), celebrated academics who were caught plagiarizing the work of others, and elected officials caught with fake university degrees.

The thing is Dwi was able to slip through the cracks because reporters never bothered to question his claims. Here he is in 2015 telling reporters that he was working on a rocket to send stuff into outer space. His lies continued to make headlines for years. Why didn't anyone attempt to verify whether it was true before hitting publish?

"It's a basic principle of journalism—to verify," Roy Thaniago, a media researcher at the media watchdog group Remotivi, told VICE. "When a journalist receives certain information or news, they should process it in a skeptical way."

When reporters fail to check out whether someone's claim is true or not, then they risk publishing "fake news" at a real news outlet—a mistake that only makes fake news itself more insidious and harder to spot, Roy explained.

But there's more at play here than just a failure to verify the facts. A lot of Indonesian journalists, unwilling to admit that they don't fully understand what they are reporting on, rely too heavily on the words of a single source in their stories.

And since they don't know much about the topic in the first place, it makes it difficult to separate the fabricated from the real, said Laksana Tri Handoko, the deputy head of science and technology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). They simply aren't skeptical enough, Laksana said.

But this is one of those rare issues with an easy solution. Reporters should simply ask someone else to double-check whatever they don't understand, he said.

"Ask an expert in their respective field, so they know if a certain claim is true," Laksana said. "An expert could help really help clarify some information. They must know the most recent updates in their community."

The whole ordeal can teach us all a few things about Indonesia, Laksana said.

"One is this nation is so thirsty for stories of inspiration and achievements, that we lose ourselves in the euphoria of [fake] good news," Laksana said. "And two is that it shows that we're lacking in literacy in the fields of science and technology."

Indonesia bats well-below average when it comes to achievements in science and technology. It's a country where 95 percent of the patents are owned by foreigners. So of course people cheer when they see a story about someone who invented some novel device.

And this, according to Roy at Remotivi, is the second big reason why Dwi was able to get away with his lies for so long. Blind nationalism tends to get in the way of rational skepticism.

"Indonesians who can 'make it' out there become a source of pride," Roy said. "So, maybe, some journalists get emotional and forget that they're journalists. So they just run the story."