New York Times: ‘Caliphate’ podcast didn’t meet standards
NEW YORK » The New York Times admitted Friday that it could not verify the claims of a Canadian man whose account of committing atrocities for the Islamic State in Syria was a central part of its 2018 podcast “Caliphate.”
The series had won a Peabody Award, the first ever for a podcast produced by the newspaper, but within hours administrators said the Times would return the award. The Overseas Press Club of America said it was rescinding its honor for “Caliphate.”
With a major hole blown in the narrative, the Times affixed an audio correction to the beginning of each part of the 12-part podcast and published an investigation into what went wrong with the story in Friday’s newspaper. The story’s central reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, will be reassigned off the terrorism beat, the Times said.
Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, said in a podcast distributed Friday that “this failing wasn’t about any one reporter. I think this was an institutional failing.”
The Times assigned an investigative team to look into the story after Canadian police in September arrested Shehroze Chaudhry, who used the alias Abu Huzayfah, for perpetrating a terrorist hoax. He told the Times that as an Islamic State soldier, he had shot one man in the head and stabbed another in the heart.
Chaudhry’s story fell apart upon further examination. Investigators concluded they couldn’t be sure he’d ever been in Syria and almost certainly didn’t commit the atrocities he’d claimed. Supposed evidence he offered to back up his story, including photos from Syria, were gathered from other sources.
The Times found he was a “fabulist” who concocted stories as an escape from his mundane life in a Toronto suburb or living with grandparents in Pakistan.
“All the evidence that he presented that he went to Syria was either ripped from somewhere else, was inconclusive or just didn’t hold up,” Mark Mazzetti, who led the Times’ investigative team on Chaudhry, said in the podcast. “We found a lot of misrepresentations by him, and nothing that independently corroborated his claims of being an ISIS executioner inside Syria.”
Chaudhry’s lawyer, Nader Hasan, would not comment on the Times’ story. He said Chaudhry was not guilty of the Canadian charges and will “vigorously defend himself.”
The Times had ample reason to be suspicious of Chaudhry’s account, since an episode of “Caliphate” was devoted to discrepancies in his story and its own factchecking. But Baquet likened it to confirmation bias, of wanting to believe what seemed like a great story.
“This is one of those cases where I think we just didn’t listen hard enough to the stuff that challenged the story or to the signs that the story wasn’t as strong as we thought it was,” he said.
Callimachi said Friday that it was “gutting” to let down her colleagues. She said she should have caught more of the “lies” Chaudhry told her, and tried to make clear what the newspaper did and didn’t know.
“It wasn’t enough,” she said in a statement. “To our listeners, I apologize for what we missed and what we got wrong. We are correcting the record and I commit to doing better in the future.”
Callimachi worked at the Associated Press from 2003 to 2014. The news organization said Friday that her reporting on terrorism “went through a rigorous editing process at all stages of the reporting and prior to publication. We stand by the stories.”