NEW YORK (AP) – The New York Times admitted on Friday that it could not verify the claims of a Canadian man whose account of atrocities committed against the Islamic State in Syria was central to his 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 withdrawing its honor for ‘caliphate’.
With a big hole in the story, the Times made an audio correction at the start of each part of the 12-part podcast and published an investigation into what went wrong with the story in Friday’s paper. The story’s central reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, will be transferred from the fight against terrorism, the Times said.
Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, said in a podcast distributed Friday that “this failure wasn’t about one reporter. I think this was an institutional failure. “
The Times ordered an investigative team to investigate the story after Canadian police arrested Shehroze Chaudhry, who used the alias Abu Huzayfah, in September for committing a terrorist hoax. He told the Times that as a soldier of the Islamic State, he shot one man in the head and stabbed another in the heart.
Chaudhry’s story fell apart upon closer examination. Investigators concluded that they were unsure that he had ever been to Syria and that they almost certainly had not committed the atrocities he claimed. Supposed evidence he offered to support his story, including photos from Syria, had been gathered from other sources.
The Times concluded that he was a “fabulist” who made up stories as an escape from everyday life in a Toronto suburb or with grandparents in Pakistan.
“All the evidence he presented that he was going to Syria had been taken from elsewhere, was inconclusive or just didn’t hold up,” said Mark Mazzetti, who led the Times’ investigation team on Chaudhry, in the podcast. “We have found many misrepresentations of him and nothing that independently confirms his claim that he is an ISIS executioner in Syria.”
Chaudhry’s attorney, Nader Hasan, declined to comment on the Times story. He said Chaudhry was not guilty of the Canadian charges and will “vigorously defend himself.”
The Times had every reason to distrust Chaudhry’s story, as an episode of “Caliphate” was devoted to discrepancies in his story and his own fact-finding. But Baquet likened it to bias of confirmation, of wanting to believe what seemed like a great story.
“This is one of those cases where I think we just weren’t listening hard enough for the things that challenged the story or the signs that the story wasn’t as strong as we thought it was,” he said.
Callimachi said Friday it was “stripping.” to abandon her colleagues. She said she should have caught more of the “lies” Chaudhry had told her, and tried to clarify what the paper did and didn’t know.
“It wasn’t enough,” she said in a statement. “I apologize to our listeners for what we missed and what we did wrong. We are correcting the record and I promise to do better in the future. “
Callimachi worked at the Associated Press from 2003 to 2014. The news organization said Friday that its coverage of terrorism “went through a rigorous editorial process at all stages of reporting and prior to publication. We stand behind the stories. “
As a result of an investigation into her work, the Times added attached notes from the editor, correcting some details in two other stories below her byline. In a 2014 story about a Syrian journalist who claimed he saw US hostages being held at a former factory in Syria, the Times notes that the source had told inconsistent stories to others. The Times also questioned the documents that formed the basis for a 2019 story that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hiding at the base of a rival group for having paid protection money.
The brother of murdered American journalist James Foley had questioned details of a Callimachi story about her brother in the past, but the Times supported her work.
Commenting on the difficulty of defeating terrorism, Baquet blamed himself and the top delegates for not paying more attention to “caliphate.” Instead, he said he had looked at so many versions of the paper’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s finances that “I could almost pay Trump’s taxes right now.”
“I personally haven’t paid enough attention to this,” he said.
The episode raises questions about whether the Times applies the same journalistic rigor to audio unit stories as it does to printed pieces. The Times moved more aggressively to audio about four years ago, producing “The Daily,” one of the most successful podcasts on the market.
In an interview with NPR, Baquet said editors used to printing pieces were reverent to an ambitious audio team that presented a compelling narrative thread.
That angered Madhulika Sikka, a former NPR executive who was also an audio executive producer at The Washington Post before she began publishing. She tweeted that if audio products operate under different rules than the rest of the newsroom, the problem is with the newsroom, not the platform.
“If this had been a printed story, would other rules have been applied?” Sikka said in an interview. “I don’t know. I found the implication in Dean Baquet’s quote reprehensible.”