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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

Is retracting enough?

So a news story gets out, millions read it, share or watch it. Then NYT retracts it. Maybe adding a footnote or correction (sometimes they don't even do that [1]) is added to the story. Maybe the story is removed from their site.

However, the faulty information has already registered into the minds of millions of people.

NYT has already intentionally or unintentionally indoctrinated the minds of many readers and with the "retraction" at the same time they can claim the highest standards of journalism.

Unless in good fait, NYT tries to bring as much attention into the correction to the readers they have already impacted, the retraction is journalistic virtue signaling and a very small victory for truth.

Even if they do as much work in publicizing the retraction so many people have already formed a biased view and it'll be hard to undo that.

The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.

[1] https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187036978463891456

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Did you listen to the podcast? Because I can't relate at all to this reaction, given nuanced take of the original series.

The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.

The second half of the series follows the reporter as she tries to corroborate the story she was told, and weighs the evidence she sees against her own knowledge. In the end the implication is that she believes part of his story is probably true, but never expresses certainty.

I didn't come away thinking I'd necessarily heard the personal account of an ISIS member. Rather, I felt that I learned a lot about the process of investigative journalism, and how incredibly difficult it is to confirm information in wartime.

The fact that it's even being retracted at all seems like overkill to me, and I think that in a different climate, where the integrity of the NYT wasn't under so much scrutiny, the response would have been more measured.

But generally, news orgs don't commit to doing huge year-long projects/investigations into something they know to be fake. Or, if they do, the story is about the fakery (and the psychology/personality of the person behind it) – it doesn't attempt to pass it off as "maybe true".

The average investigative reporter receives tons of bullshit or otherwise overhyped leads. It benefits no one to elevate each of those into a prestige project.

But the reporter believed it was most likely that part of the story was true. There was corroboration from sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS, and the photo he had on his phone that was taken in Syria.

In retrospect, they are saying the needle moved from "more likely true" to "more likely fabricated."

In any case the story he was telling was believable, and painted a realistic picture of what was happening in the region.

So it's not nearly so black and white

> In the interview with NPR lasting nearly an hour, Baquet says the Times did not have evidence Chaudhry had ever been to Syria. Nor could it show he had joined ISIS, much less killed civilians for the group. The man's account proved to be riddled with holes and contradictions. Even when confronting some of them, the reporting and producing team sought ways to show his story could still turn out to be true.

At this point, you can either believe NPR, "his story was not fact-checked at all", or the New York Times, "we did our due diligence."

One is telling the truth, and the other is lying. You can't believe them both without descending into doublethink.

I mean, they both can be true if the NYT is just really incompetent at fact checking.

That the reporter was credulous enough to believe the faker's story to be "most likely" true is the very thing that she needs to answer for.

Sorry, but "sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS" is just not a foundation of evidence, especially since the NYT refuse to describe the sources beyond the vaguest of terms (e.g. we have no idea whether one U.S. source is just agreeing that he's heard rumors from another U.S. source). Do we really need to reiterate the long history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy doing things like putting children on the no-fly list?

The main thing that matters is the documentable evidence that the NYT had access to. Like his passport stamps and social media. To quote from the NYT's investigation [0]:

> But far from proving Mr. Chaudhry’s jihadist bona fides, at least one of the pictures was a brazen copy of widely available news photography, The Times’s examination found. The original image had been taken months earlier by a photographer for the official Russian news agency, Tass, and had been distributed by Getty Images, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of photographs...

> Other images Mr. Chaudhry provided as evidence that he had gone to Syria — specifically, snapshots he said he had taken of armed men at the beach, whom he described as his “fellow fighters” — also proved to be identical to photographs that had been posted on Twitter years before by Syrian antiwar activists, The Times’s examination found. And as with other images, Mr. Chaudhry misrepresented — or perhaps didn’t actually know — where, and sometimes when, they had been taken.

So either the NYT went ahead with publishing this full fledged project knowing that Mr. Chaudhry, the subject, had stolen photos and claimed them as his own. Or, they went ahead and accepted his social media photos as evidence, without even doing a cursory reverse image search – which is unconscionable given the severe and immediate doubts raised by Mr. Chaudhry's passport.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

Journalism is the act of hunting for truth. I don't think any reputable outlet goes into an investigation knowing what the outcome is going to be. Journalists are good at looking at evidence and identifying possible outcomes and many times their assumptions turn out to be true after rigorous research, but this is different then knowing what an outcome of a story is going to be.

Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.

Here are the Pulitzers for International Reporting, for which "Caliphate" was a finalist in 2019:

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/210

I challenge you to find another winner or finalist in this category in which the truth value of the published assertions is portrayed as merely optional.

> Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.

Well, it's what the original Serial did. That format has inspired a lot of the podcasting world.

For starters, Serial is universally regarded as an exceptional project – i.e. the exception that proves the rule – and a project that has always been under a considerable amount of controversy. In any case, the podcast itself never insinuated that it could make a case for Adnan Syed's innocence. And more relevant with respect to Caliphate, the foundational facts are not in doubt: Adnan Syed was indeed the ex-boyfriend of the victim, and he was indeed convicted of her murder and serving a life sentence.

I haven't listened to the podcast.

Can I ask, how would you feel about conspiracy videos doing the same thing? Those that present a conspiracy and then show a reporter trying to verify the theory that ends with the reporter indicating they believe "part of [the] story is probably true, but never expresses certainty." I just can't help think that if the topic was aliens or 9/11 instead of the Caliphate and the author was fox news or reason magazine, you'd consider it drivel.

I can't remember what it was, but I feel I've seen such documentaries or podcasts before. As long as it's done in good faith, I'm happy about it. Like if you don't get the impression they're actually trying to convince you of anything, but are more just welcoming you through their own process of learning about something and then ending with a bit of an ambiguous, well I still don't know for sure one way or another, but maybe there is more substance than I thought at first.

Edit: I didn't actually listen to Caliphate though, so I don't know if it appears done in good faith or not.

Well, that's certainly not the way I feel. If aliens haven't been visiting humans for years, I don't want to watch a video going through the process of learning about the possibility that they might have been visiting humans for years and then ending a bit ambiguous.

I don't think this was anything like that, though.

The story that they were investigating was completely plausible because it painted a very realistic picture of things that were happening in Syria at the time.

I suppose the one part of this that is potentially harmful and false is that the ISIS member was living free in Toronto (while bragging about it on social media).

Plausibe is fine to a point. The context here is journalism, and with that comes responsibilities. The fact an outfit as reputable as NYT chose not to fulfill its obligations should give anyone reasonable pause. This was a relatively meaningless story. What happens when something more significant is involed? And the stakes (read: possible revenue) higher?

I suspect your idea of 'very realistic' is from news sources like the NYT and not from actually being to Syria.

As someone who has been to Syria multiple times, I can assure you that US news is much closer to Hollywood than reality.

> The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.

Maybe don't do that in a newspaper (or related media) that purports to be about factual subjects, and keep it in your memoirs. The NYT was Curveball's main outlet (through Judith Miller) so maybe they were just feeling nostalgic.

The meat of the story wasn’t even this guy’s account. I think it was then finding a cache of administrative documents from somewhere in Iraq and having a deep look into ISIS government, its operations etc.

Beyond just abstractly infiltrating minds, this story directly bolstered real policy changes with real consequences for Canadian asylum seekers including children.

This whole thing is shameful and embarrassing, or at least it should be.

I recommend reading what folks like Laila Al-Alarian and other non-NYT folks have been saying about this cf*k for some time:

https://twitter.com/PeterHamby/status/1340022426223034370?s=...

https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1339998015399088129?s=2...

https://twitter.com/LailaAlarian/status/1340002570404806656?...

Also worth looking into Rukmini’s funding sources and how she was vaulted into this position of primacy for an eye into the geopolitical machinations that lead to this sort of thing playing out.

Personally I subscribe to the NYT and I only heard about this story because of the retraction and investigation that they published in the newspaper. So at least from my perspective as a NYT customer, they have done enough to let me know they messed up here. They've also reassigned the journalist to another beat, which isn't loss of a job, but fact-checking is a team effort and I don't think it's fair for a journalist to bear the entire brunt of the fallout.

Same here, I'm a paying NYT subscriber, never heard the podcast, but I did see the multiple stories of the retraction on the front page. I would argue far MORE people heard of the retraction than ever listened to the original podcast.

They put the retraction in the podcast feed, which I'm guessing most people who listened to the series are still subscribed to.

If the podcast stopped posting new episodes, a lot of people will miss a new one.

Most podcast apps stop auto-downloading dead feeds.

They also advertised it in The Daily, one of the most popular podcasts around, which is how I heard about it since I unsubbed from the Caliphate feed (as it was finished).

EDIT: Most charts put it at #2 in US [0].

[0] https://chartable.com/charts/itunes/us-all-podcasts-podcasts

EDIT2: They also wrote a full column in the NYT itself.

> Is retracting enough?

That's the modern propaganda M.O. Lie and then retract and demand praise for retracting.

Go look up Nayirah's testimony where a kuwaiti diplomat's daughter lied about iraqi soldiers killing "incubator babies" and the media, working with government, spread the lies intentionally to start the first iraq war.

Go read about the nonexistent WMDs that the media like the NYT lied about to start the 2nd iraq war.

> The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.

That's not going to anything. The news industry "recycles" journalists/editors like the catholic church recycles pedophile priests.

People should simply be taught what Thomas Jefferson knew. "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day"

The problem is that people expect truth and facts from the news industry. People should be taught what the news industry is - a propaganda outlet for the elites. And then let the people judge accordingly. The NYTimes will always be a corrupt agenda driven propaganda organization. You can't change that. What you can change are people's understanding of what the NYTimes is.

I oftentimes wonder why people want to defend the NYT and the only conclusion I can come up with is that they mistakenly believe they're part of the elite.

Simple defense mechanism. They were raised in educated households where its reporting was considered on practically its own epistemological plane of journalism, its writing standards a model around which to improve their own, and it's just really hard to face the fact that an institution you idolized has flaws, because it means you have to admit you were fooled.

The fact that we're even talking about the credibility of the NYT already places it on a higher epistemological plane than the mainstream media (TV news, social media, etc).

You wrap yourself up in your conspiracy theories and your "real truths" and judge the entirety of journalism to be a bad faith operation, that their is no nuance, no good individual actors in the system. That's why I downvote rants and nonsense.

Here's what's on nytimes.come right now:

- UK imposes harsher crackdown in London

- Moderna's vaccine will be shipped next week across the US

- Pompeo says Russia was behind the SolarWinds hack

I'm not going to conclude from this that the UK relaxed its lockdown, the vaccine will not be shipped, and Pompeo said Russia was not behind the hack.

The happy medium is: know when a newspaper was in a position to know the truth and trust them if they were, or if the article explains its evidentiary basis in convincing detail.

I found this to be a good description of what to watch out for https://youtu.be/v-8t0EfLzQo

It's not even whether they're telling you a true thing, it's the story they tell around it

> Here's what's on nytimes.come right now:

What's your point? You could make the same argument on every propaganda outlet. Do the same thing for fox news, xinhua, al jazeera, rt, etc.

It's naive to think that propaganda necessarily means lies. It's half-truths, excessive coverage, ignoring of topics, etc.

> The happy medium is: know when a newspaper was in a position to know the truth and trust them if they were, or if the article explains its evidentiary basis in convincing detail.

No. That's the childish naive view. You should know that every newspaper is an agenda driven propaganda organization serving the interests of the elites ( after all it is the elites who created these newspapers ) and judge accordingly. No newspaper is deserving of trust or should be trusted because their primarly goal is to deceive. Anyone who trusts a newspaper or a politician is a moron at this point. Just take everything they say with a grain of salt and move on.

Certainly the last thing one should do is worship the NY Times which many here sadly do. But then again old people are their target demographic. Easily scared and insecure.

The fact that you are being down-voted just by acknowledging something that is not controversial at all, illustrates clearly how the elites are winning heavily the battle on the narrative of current affairs. The media should not be trusted, AT ALL.They have their own interests and agendas , very different, from the ones of a common citizen.Never forget that.

You are right, but what the hell is one to do? There are no credible media organizations with the resources of the NYT.

For what it's worth, I did see the retraction displayed fairly prominently below the fold on nytimes.com yesterday. So they're not trying to bury it, at least.

I wonder if podcasts are a much riskier medium because of this. When have 12 episodes drilling in ideas based on a faulty premise, it's a lot harder to effectively say "oops," and being longer, there are a lot more opportunities for something to go wrong.

There also ought to be an economic incentive, for example refunds to paying readers.

It is interesting to me that (for a podcast at least) there’s presumably more than enough data available somewhere to send a notification of the retraction if NYT was so inclined. Surely iTunes, Spotify, etc. could identify the vast majority of people who downloaded and listened to these episodes. How come my data is only used to target me when it’s beneficial to these major companies and not when it’s beneficial to me?

> How come my data is only used to target me when it’s beneficial to these major companies and not when it’s beneficial to me?

This is a glib answer, but it’s because there’s no incentive (financial or otherwise) for these companies to do that

I subscribe to the NYT, but it's not the only thing I read. The retraction was plastered all over in the press.

So you link to Tim Pool?!

Holy agenda pushing...

> Holy agenda pushing...

Mind explaining that?

Tim Pool is a fringe right-wing media figure who has little interest in seeking out the truth.

Tim frequently shared stories with no truth to them, eg. 2020 Election fraud. He also frequently tells his listeners to distrust the “Democrat Media”. His arguments would typically be considered in bad faith on HN. Linking to Timcast from and article about the NYT is definitely pushing an agenda.

> Is retracting enough?

No. They need to fire Rukmini. Just because she is considered a "superstar" in the newsroom doesn't mean she gets off the hook for embarrassing the company with a debunked project.

I'm not sure that's the thing they need to do.

What i want is a post mortem. What went wrong in their organization that let it through, and what changes are they going to make to ensure it doesn't happen again?

That seem ridiculous and unfair. Feels akin to fixing a security breach by firing the dev who introduced the vulnerability. What they need to do is adopt better processes and put mechanism in place for things like that not to happen again, no matter who the journalist would be.

> Feels akin to fixing a security breach by firing the dev who introduced the vulnerability.

How big is the breach? If it's a minor incident, sure, keep the dev. However, if the dev introduced a breach that caused the company millions of dollars in damages and likely an outside investigation, then that dev will likely be fired for incompetence.

> That seem ridiculous and unfair.

Not at all. That's how the media industry works: Factual errors are a cardinal sin.

The New York Times is the one of the most prestigious journalistic institutions in the world, one who touts its "Paper of Record" title with a reputation for thorough and accurate reporting.

Rukmini, Andy Mills, and their editors are expected to abide by those standards. With Caliphate, that went out the window. Not to mention the numerous red flags raised by other reporters and editors within The Times' Foreign team that pointed to questionable reporting and sourcing by to Rukmini.

Caliphate has collapsed under its weak reporting, forcing The Times to revoke and return several prestigious awards, including a Peabody and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, an embarrassing look for the paper. And, for that, heads should roll, from Rukmini and Mills to the editors overseeing the project.

However, this likely won't happen. Rukmini has already been reassigned to another section and will likely continue her work (in reality, The Times won't let go of one its "star" reporters, and Rukmini won't find a more lucrative gig at a news organization with as much prestige and resources than The Times). Mills, however, will likely be fired, and not because of Caliphate: There are reports of Mills' predatory behavior toward young, female journalists, and many of them are coming forward. The outcry will likely reach a fever pitch and likely lead to his resignation next year.

> they can claim the highest standards of journalism

Just keep these failures in mind any time in the future NYT is quoted. They don’t deserve

One reporter's mistakes don't invalidate a whole newsroom.

99.9% of the time the NYT's scoops are subsequently verified by other news organisations in short order.

They have been doing this over and over a lot about tech reporting. Borderline malicious reporting by omitting key details to paint whatever narrative they want.

Why? They see tech as a direct competitor and want as much smearing as they can.

So, it is not a isolated incident.

> Why? They see tech as a direct competitor and want as much smearing as they can.

That's absolute nonsense. How in the world does the NY Times compete directly with Facebook, Google, Spotify etc? There's a bit of indirect competition (ad revenue, podcast viewership) but nothing direct.

99.9% of domestic stories that are easier to verify. NYT has plenty of wiggle room abroad, especially when the domestic audience can't understand the language of the region covered.

Here's a recent example that NYT ended up getting pretty wrong: Finland, ‘Prepper Nation of the Nordics,’ Isn’t Worried About Masks

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus-...

When we (Finland) actually opened the famed stockpiles, we found we had protective gear for about next 3 weeks. The cited chief executive of Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency, Mr. Lounema ended up promptly resigning, and the whole case was a big scandal in Finnish news for several weeks:

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/stockpile_boss_resigns_af...

https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000006469197.html

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11302248

https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/jutut/kotimaa/mielipide-kotimaa/v...

It's not the sort of article for which you'd typically issue a retraction, since there are no incorrect figures cited and they are honest about the limits of their reporting:

There is little publicly available information on the number of masks and other supplies that Finland has or where exactly they are stored.

I'm not sure they are even wrong to have used that rosy, positive tone about Finland's PPE stockpile. Compared to the United States, Finland seem to have had things relatively under control in terms of supplies?

I mean, compared to the United States, Finland seems to have done pretty well since somebody who screwed up actually lost their job. Consider the difference in point of view: our federal government were screwing up constantly with PPE supplies and nobody ever resigned. All a topic for a different story, I guess.

Crisis is coming. Will country X have it in control? Let's ask some top politicians and government agency directors, do you think you'll have it in control? Of course they are going to answer yes. Let's run a big story: "Country X has crisis in control". What is the value of news like this?

What if in March, a Finnish news agency had interviewed US president Trump's office and maybe US CDC Director Dr. Redfield, asked them if US has the pandemic situation in control, and after they replied yes, then ran a story "US has pandemic in control"? Would you say that's ok – after all they'd be honest about the limits of their reporting, and are just citing their sources.

I'm not sure we have a big disagreement. These sorts of stories are stupid, but in my view, they're just not worthy of retraction because they don't break the rules or tell outright falsehoods. At least not when they're standalone stories. On the other hand, if the NYT ran a large number of stories like this, not blatantly untrue but offering too rosy a picture of the preparedness of the Finnish government as part of a big campaign to alter public opinion, that would be more of an attempt at deception, and more of a problem. I'm not sure why they'd do that, but we could point at analogous series of stories they've done over the last 30 years. (An awful lot of the NYT's behavior in the early 2000s was fairly awful, even when it was superficially within journalistic standards.)

> What if in March, a Finnish news agency had interviewed US president Trump's office and maybe US CDC Director Dr. Redfield, asked them if US has the pandemic situation in control, and after they replied yes, then ran a story "US has pandemic in control"? Would you say that's ok – after all they'd be honest about the limits of their reporting, and are just citing their sources.

Some of it is about trusting the reader. I would be disappointed in a Finnish reporter who left the US government's employee's rosy assessment unchallenged in the absence of evidence, and in a Finnish editor who decided to run the story, but in 2020, I'd be disappointed in the reader who took such claims by the US Government seriously without evidence.

> they don't break the rules or tell outright falsehoods They don’t but that hardly qualifies as “highest standard of journalism”

No argument here.

NYT: Europe == good; Asia == shit

I can’t claim any number so I don’t. I would love to see how you came up with that number, can you share source?

It is very different from my experience

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