"The newspaper says it didn’t properly scrutinize the claims of Shehroze Chaudhry, who has since been charged with making up his terrorism past."
The New York Times on Friday released the findings of its internal investigation into star reporter Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS and extremism in the Middle East.... Callimachi came under intense scrutiny after the main subject of her Peabody award-winning podcast, titled Caliphate, was charged in Canada earlier this year with making up a terrorism hoax in which he claimed to have joined ISIS in Syria and have been a part of its brutal police force. Law-enforcement officials said that, in reality, Shehroze Chaudhry, better known by his alias Abu Huzayfah, lied about his exploits to the media, and had actually never traveled to Syria. His arrest immediately sparked questions at the Times, which through Callimachi’s reporting had leaned heavily on Chaudhry’s allegedly fabricated story.
ADDED: NPR has good detail:
"We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes," New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet Tells Npr in an interview on Thursday. "I think we were so in love with it that when when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn't listen hard enough." ...
A separate internal review of Caliphate's reporting process was led by senior investigative editor Dean Murphy. He found that Callimachi and her editors repeatedly failed to push hard enough to verify Chaudhry's claims, Baquet tells NPR. "They came back and said, 'If you look at the guy's story, there is not enough powerful evidence that he was who he claimed to be for us to justify that story," Baquet says.
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 kill 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. Baquet says top editors long accustomed to editing complex written investigative pieces were deferential to an ambitious audio investigative team presenting a compelling narrative yarn.
He says he shares in that blame. "I thought we produced another, you know, 'Holy damn!' story," Baquet recalled. "I was really proud of it. Another big story to embrace and applaud."...
Baquet declines to say whether other Times journalists would receive reprimands or be reassigned as a result of the internal review. He says he would work with Callimachi to determine a fresh assignment, praising her recent investigation on the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.
"I do not see how Rukmini could go back to covering terrorism after one of the highest profile stories of terrorism is getting knocked down in this way," Baquet says....
