"Baquet says the Times did not have evidence Chaudhry had ever been to Syria"
How do you fail to do even the most basic fact checking? They've clearly learned nothing since Judith Miller.
How do you fail to do even the most basic fact checking? They've clearly learned nothing since Judith Miller.
And the NYT has no standard for peer review, and in the digital age routinely edits its works after publication without any discernible changelog. See the 1619 scandal.
First sentence of the article:
> The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags
Clearly it would have been better for them to have done their jobs correctly in the first place, but in what way are they not displaying journalistic integrity in this instance? Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.
Mistakes are inevitable (though in this case avoidable). Owning up to publishing something erroneous is the way you display journalistic integrity. I'll trust what you tell me today, if I can trust you to tell me the details you got wrong tomorrow.
Yeah that's their spin on the story, the reality is that they got busted though.
It was the Washington Post and not Rolling Stone themselves that discovered holes in the story. But Rolling Stone owned up to it and engaged the Columbia School of Journalism to investigate the lapses in their reporting and fact-checking processes, resulting in a damning report which RS published in a subsequent issue.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/rolling-st...
I don't expect NYT to be perpetually fact checking stories after publication, but when they "get busted," I absolutely expect them to re-investigate and publish their findings.
A good summary: https://web.archive.org/web/20150410094429/http://www.bloomb...
Ultimately, whether she stays on their payroll is the decider for me as to whether they have journalistic integrity.
I was discussing this with my parents (both former editors of major publications) who have had to fire people for creating composite characters like this. The lack of basic fact checking, followed up by attacking the Canadian authorities [0] once it started to come to light that the story was untrue is very unsavory. I think this should be career-ending.
[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032
They relied on the gut-check from other terrorism experts, what was publicly available about Canada's investigation, and got a verification from a field commander in ISIS who said that he remembered the fraudster but the fraudster didn't serve directly under him like he had claimed. In retrospect, the hook of the story was so strong that they hadn't subjected it to the level of scrutiny of their other ambitious projects. He contrasted it with the Trump tax return story, where he had personally reviewed so many versions of that story that he had memorized the details. When they gave the same investigation to another investigative team who was familiar with the terror beat (with the benefit of hindsight), that team concluded that the story was a hoax.
We all do this. Most of the time its harmless but when it is a news organization it can become harmful and there will still be people who believe the story is true or that it is based on a truth.
Fortunately the internet has given us more of both, the stories we want to be true but are not and the stories that are true we wish there we not. Now we have many more eyes on both so that they can be called out for what they are.