NEW YORK (AP) – After an internal investigation, The New York Times said Friday it was wrong to trust a Canadian man that the account of the atrocities of the Islamic State was a central part of the 2018 podcast “Caliphate,” but that it could not be verified.
The series had won a Peabody Award, the first for a podcast produced by the newspaper, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
But the Times began re-examining the 12-part podcast after Canadian police arrested Shehroze Chaudhry, who used the alias Abu Huzayfah, for committing a terrorist deception. His story of participating in executions and witnessing other atrocities had been included in the podcast.
“In the absence of stronger evidence, the‘ caliphate ’should have been substantially revised to exclude material related to Mr Chaudhry,” The Times reported on Friday. “The podcast as a whole should not have been produced with Mr. Chaudhry as the central narrative character.”
The Times had many reasons to distrust Chaudhry’s account, as an episode of “Caliphate” was devoted to discrepancies in its history and its own control of facts.
But the newspaper said Friday that it should have worked harder to verify the claims before deciding to turn Chaudhry into a central character.
His reporters were “too gullible about the verification steps taken and despised the lack of corroboration of essential aspects” of Chaudhry’s story, the newspaper said.
The Times said he should have had an experienced editor in the subject matter involved in the series from the beginning. The podium’s lead journalist, Rukmini Callimachi, will remain in the newspaper but will be reassigned, the newspaper said.
Callimachi said Friday that he was “dodging” his colleagues. He said he should have caught more of the lies Chaudhry told him and tried to make clear what he was doing and didn’t know the diary.
“It wasn’t enough,” he said in a statement. “To our listeners, I apologize for what we missed and for what we did wrong. We are correcting the record and I promise to do better in the future.
Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, said in a podcast to be released Friday that he and other newspaper leaders should be to blame for the incident.
Callimachi worked for the Associated Press from 2003 to 2014. The news organization said Friday that its reports on terrorism “went through a rigorous editing process at all stages of the notification and before the publication. We stand by the stories. “
The episode raises questions about whether the Times audio unit, which became more active about four years ago, is set to apply the same journalistic rigor to the stories as the newspaper’s text version does. The audio unit produces “The Daily,” one of the most successful podcasts on the market.
The newspaper published its own investigation into Chaudhry’s claims on Friday, concluding that he was a “fabulist” who invented stories such as an escape from his more mundane life in a Toronto suburb or who lived with grandparents in Pakistan.
There are still some disputes over whether he even traveled to Syria. Canadian officials say he never did so or joined the Islamic State, although U.S. intelligence officials still have some doubts, the newspaper said. Investigators found that Chaudhry had passed on photographs taken by others in Syria as his own.
No evidence has emerged to support his claims of participating in atrocities: shooting one man in the head and stabbing another in the heart before hanging his body on a cross, the newspaper said. Chaudhry’s lawyer, Nader Hasen, said his client would “vigorously defend” himself against Canadian charges. He made no comment on the Times’ actions.
Peabody Awards jurors are debating what to do in his honor, executive director Jeffrey Jones said Friday.