The New York Times acknowledged that its 2018 award-winning podcast “Caliphate” did not meet the paper’s editorial standards.
The podcast featured the claims made by Shehroze Chaudhry, who has since been charged with concocting a terrorist hoax, and the publication admitted on Friday that it had not done enough to ensure the accuracy of his claims following an investigation, which was launched after his arrest in September.
“When the New York Times does deep, big, ambitious journalism in any format, we put it to a tremendous amount of scrutiny at the upper levels of the newsroom,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in a podcast interview. “We did not do that in this case. And I think that I or somebody else should have provided that same kind of scrutiny because it was a big, ambitious piece of journalism. And I did not provide that kind of scrutiny, nor did my top deputies with deep experience in examining investigative reporting.”
The 12-part audio documentary, which was done by Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times correspondent who has frequently reported from conflict zones and has since been reassigned, referenced the claims made by Chaudhry, who was using the pseudonym Abu Huzayfah, such as the atrocities he said he witnessed in Syria and his involvement in execution-style killings, even though the podcast’s team could not sufficiently corroborate the claims.
The New York Times review found that “Caliphate” gave too much credence to his false or exaggerated accounts.
In an editors’ note posted on Friday, the paper said its investigation “found a history of misrepresentations by Mr. Chaudhry and no corroboration that he committed the atrocities he described in the ‘Caliphate’ podcast. As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of ‘Caliphate’ that presented Mr. Chaudhry’s claims did not meet our standards for accuracy.”
“From the outset, ‘Caliphate’ should have had the regular participation of an editor experienced in the subject matter,” the note continued. “In addition, The Times should have pressed harder to verify Mr. Chaudhry’s claims before deciding to place so much emphasis on one individual’s account.”
Baquet recognized that the incident was an “institutional failing.”
“And in the end, good journalism comes from some sort of internal debate over whether or not the stuff that supports the story is more powerful than the stuff that refutes the story,” he continued. “I think this is one of those cases where I think we just didn’t listen hard enough to the stuff that challenged the story and to the signs that maybe our story wasn’t as strong as we thought it was.”
