Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

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Just listened to most of this earlier. I don't quite get it.

IIRC, the original series did treat Chaudhry as dubious, but maybe partially truthful . He was caught on a timeline lie, confronted by the journalist, he adjusted his timeline... Also, the whole series was constructed somewhat naively. It follows the journalist's investigations sequentially. The "story" follows leads and narratives that do or don't turn out to be true. You're following an investigation in progress. In that frame, this is just further evidence as the story continues.

Caliphate just isn't framed as a traditional print "feature" where the journalist weighs everything in advance and only references fact-checked reliable evidence once they're done.

I actually felt that caliphate did a better-than-most job at communicating shades of certainty. I wish the NYT did more of this. Journalistic standards are good tools, but they do not (should not, IMO) just sort everything into "true" or "unverified" piles and . Uncertainty about truth is inevitable. Communicate this well, honestly, and we'll all be better informed.

This felt like way more than a retraction. Maybe they're using it as a "teaching moment" about how journalism works. I don't love it though. I can think of much better targets for NYT mea culpa or soul search. Caliphate is not a low watermark for journalism in any way. Maybe I'm missing something.

If they (or any major paper) is feeling reflective, why not reflect on more systemic questions. How about double confirmed rumours from anonymous sources? Two sources, even if both remain nameless and have a personal interest in leaking to the press is considered fine.. I believe. This is common in political reporting. Stuff gets leaked. Journalists get confirmation from another insider.. maybe two. That can be printed. If it turns out to be a fallacious rumour, they still "met standards." Maybe they print a retraction, but no one did anything wrong. Meanwhile, this is the cause of many untruths getting published each year.

> He was caught on a timeline lie, confronted by the journalist, he adjusted his timeline

The fact that they kept going after this (and didn't investigate further) is when you start having serious issues. You can see her attacking the Canadian police once it starts coming to light more and more that he was lying - she was attached to the story (and the fame) and didn't want to hear otherwise. [0]

I am glad that the NYT retracted it, this was a good move, but I think this ought to be career-ending for her.

[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032

Maybe I came off as more definitive than I intended. I agree with the retraction. It was required, but it's really more of a follow-on than a retraction. An apology to Canadian police is more necessary, probably. That's a no-fault too though, in my estimation. They had to keep quiet while investigating, and temporarily absorb criticism. That's a hazard of the job though.

I see nothing wrong with this tweet, never mind "career-ending."

"1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm"

Shades of uncertainty. This is honest journalism. Whether or not she felt overconfident in any given detail or narrative, the we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.

I am not a journalist. I can tell from that podcast that there are reasons for the strong reaction that look different from a journalistic perspective and a layman's one. I think the difference (to me) is frame.

If in episode 3, she totally believes his account and by episode 6 she's dubious... that's the nature of doing investigative journalism as a temporal series.

> he we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.

They might "complicate the narrative" but they're putting it out there as being at least partially true when it was actually entirely false. It isn't "honest" journalism to keep putting out your sensationalized stories with just a little added "narrative tension."

> I see nothing wrong with this tweet

Read the entire thread - she is basically suggesting that the reason they didn't charge him is because they are incompetent.

Both of my parents are former editors at major national publications. My mom has had to fire people for stuff like this. They think that this was a breach of journalistic integrity and pretty much career-ending.

>>they're putting it out there as being at least partially true when it was actually entirely false.

We know now that it was entirely false. She didn't at the time. The flak at Canadian police had to take is regrettable. They were investigating, had to keep quiet, and couldn't "clear their name" for several months. She owes an apology, but that's somewhat outside of "The Caliphate" itself.

Look... I realize that my take on this is contradictory to journalistic norms. Maybe there is actual tension between practicable "journalistic integrity" and my layman's definition of "honest" journalism.

Frame matters a lot. If you are printing a single column article summarizing the Chaudery saga, standard "journalist integrity" makes a lot of sense. Not verified enough. The primary source is lying about some stuff at least. Don't print.

If you are making an audio series that follows a journalist on investigation... This allows for shades of uncertainty. Callimachi is very confident in the source at first. Later, she catches him on some lies. By the end, he's clearly a dubious source at best. I don't think you can summarize this as "putting it out there." This isn't a Reuters wire. You can have ambiguity.

She should not have jumped to the conclusion that Canadian police were inept. That was bad instincts, and an investigative failure resulted.

In any case, I'm not saying it's journalistically perfect. I'm just shocked that it is being treated as a low watermark. I feel like a lot of reporting can and does clear a "journalistic integrity" hurdle, but scores much lower than Callimachi in my estimation of "honest journalism." I guess we value different things.

Tangent: something about this thread is making me think of "The Wire," All the lines about "good police work."

As other people have said, she'll probably fail upwards. Others in the past have tried to stop her from, well, lying, and have failed, even more so, those people have seen their career negatively affected by that. Via /r/syriancivilwar/ I've come across this article from 2018 [1] which detailed how the former NYTimes Baghdad correspondent Margaret Coker lost her job because she had tried to stop Callimachi.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/...

Ah yes, my parents (who are former national editors) had told me about this sort of discontent among bureau chiefs around her, although they didn't name the particular names.

Just by it happening, it's already career-limiting. I'm not sure every even serious screw up needs to result in a firing squad. That said, this is certainly in the category of things that can certainly end up that way at a major news org. See also Rathergate.

> Just by it happening, it's already career-limiting

Oh absolutely - and I don't think she shouldn't necessarily be a journalist/storyteller anymore (clearly has somewhat of a knack for it) but not at a NYT/Wapo/WSJ.

For all the heat those pubs get, my personal experience with them is that they're pretty meticulous with their reporting. (Which of course doesn't mean they don't sometimes miss the bigger picture even if their facts as reported are correct.)

I had a total nothingburger quote in the WSJ a bit back and the whole process took 2 phone discussions, some back and forth messaging, and a fact check on email (presumably to put on record). For something that was completely banal.

> The fact that they kept going after this (and didn't investigate further) is when you start having serious issues

Honestly, the biggest error they mentioned in the correction in my opinion was with the photos. Turns out they ended up reverse image searching some of the photos he had posted, and many of them were stolen from other sources. That right there would've been another huge red flag.

Yeah, this was my reaction as well. The reason I found Caliphate interesting was not the details of Chaudhry's story, which I experienced as were portrayed as dubious and in need of verification throughout; I certainly finished the podcast feeling uncertain whether Chaudhry had actually done any of the things he claimed.

Instead, the reason I've recommended this podcast to friends is that it spends most of its time on a fascinating exploration of the journalistic process. How does reporter verify claims made by people about events in a war zone? The people you interview have a reason to lie to you, sneaking across borders doesn't generate passport stamps, and reliable records are hard to come by.

This latest news feels like an interesting addendum to all that; I'd have expected any other podcast publisher to do an additional episode or two covering the new evidence and grappling with what that changes about the conclusions one can draw (certainly Serial has done a number of updates on new evidence about its past stories).

That said, my sense is that the NYT is taking this extreme action in part because they in retrospect are unhappy with the fact-checking process for the podcast, and I could see that sort of concern motivating this type of retraction/disowning despite all the uncertainty the podcast itself presented.

>> Also, the whole series was constructed somewhat naively.

I would use the word naively if it weren't journalist Rukmini Callimachi, who has created her entire career on the basis of secret terrorism in the Muslim community. At this point, that is her entire narrative and she finds anything to support it and ignores whatever doesnt support this specific narrative.

Interestingly, he never covers similar things in other religious communities and focuses only on Muslims. She is this generation's Daniel Pipes.

Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance

I don't mean "naively" in the "the author is neutral" sense.

I mean that it is not framed like an encyclopedia or conventional investigative journalism print. It is framed as the story of the investigation. It isn't "my conclusions after investigating this for 2 years." This frames has a lot of room for shades of uncertainty than conventional ones.

In that sense, this is actually a better

Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade. Ot's normal that careers are made on the biggest story of a decade.

I'm not saying she has no biases. Journalists have biases. Political biases, biases to certain archetypal narratives, the importance or truth of their own story, etc. But, moreso than most, Caliphate did portray a detail rich picture. You can make your own judgements with facts she provides, even if they are different to hers. That's honest journalism.

>>Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance

I guess this is the reason I wrote the comment originally. It's disingenuous to portray this as a low watermark for NYT (or most other big newsorgs). There are many worse offences.

Since you are comparing to fox news and balance, I assume you are comparing to "opinion reporting," and such. If we include that, then half the ship is under water. Opinion writing is outside of the journalistic standards allegedly violated here. But by layman standards, Callimachi is far more honest and balanced than any opinion at NYT... and obviously cable news stuff.

>> Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade.

This is pretty circular logic. Her topics are newsworthy because she is covering them, and adjacent un-covered topics happen to become not-newsworthy because she is ignoring them. The NYT editorial staff is def at fault, but she is she, as their designated "Terrorism Reporter [who only covers a certain type of terrorism]" She literally gets to define terrorism by example and undefine it by what she ignores to cover.

As an example, most people in the US I've spoken to dont consider the 2011 Norway attacks "terrorism" because they have not been covered as such. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks) The coverage makes the news and everything else disappears into history when the supposed paper of record conveniently ignores part of the narrative.

As an another example, consider the Russian-Chechnyan conflict.

If the newspaper decides to cover only Russian atrocities, that becomes the news and that is how popular opinion forms and that is what drives US foreign policy.

If instead the newspaper decides to cover only Chechnyan atrocities, that becomes the news and that is how popular opinion forms and that is what drives US foreign policy.

>>This is pretty circular logic. Her topics are newsworthy because she is covering them, and adjacent un-covered topics happen to become not-newsworthy because she is ignoring them.

Who's logic is circular here? ..or do you mean that reality follows a circular logic?

I totally agree that some news is "media generated" and newsworthiness becomes circular. Celebrity news, a lot of political news, some hard news cause celebre. Plenty of room for gray area and disagreement about which news issue qualifies as "media generated."

OTOH, reality still exists. Not everything is media generated. The moon landing was objectively newsworthy at the highest level. A national election is objectively newsworthy. So is the rise of ISIS, the successful recruitment of so many volunteers from so many places. Practices within their territory. The scale, impact, etc of the "caliphate" story make it totally newsworthy. More than any other terrorism/radicalism/insurgency/cult story of the decade by a long mile.

That's the topic of Caliphate. "Abu Huzafya" is not the story. He is a (false) character in the story. A detail. He wouldn't have been newsworthy in his own right even if he had been real. ISIS was the story.

There was a "media generated" local, side narrative about "why is this guy free?" Canadian police couldn't clear it up straight away, because the investigation was still going. Unfortunate, technically "media generated.... but ultimately irrelevant to any big picture.

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