Caliphate

» see nytimes.com/column/caliphate as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Caliphate started on 19 April 2018 and ran twelve episodes to 21 June. It was The New York Times building something bigger than a daily news podcast: a reported audio series following Rukmini Callimachi, the paper's terrorism correspondent, as she worked the Islamic State story from Iraq and from her phone. Andy Mills produced it. The sound design was expensive and the reporting was first person, and the whole thing was pitched as what a newspaper could do with audio once it stopped reading the paper aloud.

The series was a success immediately and an institutional one by the next spring. It won a Peabody Award and a citation from the Overseas Press Club of America. Callimachi was named a Pulitzer finalist in international reporting for 2019. Inside the Times it was the proof that the audio department deserved the budget it was getting.

I did not hear a minute of it while it was running. The show arrived for me as its own scandal in the winter of 2020, because a newspaper of that size retracting its flagship audio project carries much further than the project ever did. Everything I know about Caliphate I learned in the wrong order, starting from the editor's note and working backwards.

~ the source ~

The spine of the series was a young man from Burlington, Ontario, who used the name Abu Huzayfah. He told Callimachi he had gone to Syria to fight for the Islamic State and had carried out executions there, and he described them in detail on tape. Doubts about him were public almost at once. In May 2018, weeks after the series launched, Canadian members of parliament were demanding action against him, and he was telling the CBC that the killings had not happened.

On 25 September 2020 the RCMP arrested him under his real name, Shehroze Chaudhry, and charged him with perpetrating a hoax regarding terrorist activity. The police position was that he had never been a fighter at all. That arrest is what forced the Times into an internal review of its own series, two years after the awards.

~ the dossier ~

~ the note at the top of the transcript ~

The review landed on 18 December 2020. The Times published an editor's note saying that the episodes presenting Mr. Chaudhry's claims did not meet its standards for accuracy. The same note recorded a history of misrepresentation by him and no corroboration anywhere for the atrocities he had described. The Peabody was returned and the Overseas Press Club rescinded its citation. Callimachi stopped covering terrorism for the paper.

Not everybody thought the note went far enough. The Washington Post's media critic argued that it fell short of an actual retraction, since it left the work standing with an annotation rather than taking it down. The Times took the view that the record should stay visible, which is why all twelve episodes are still online today with the note attached at the top.

The criminal case ended quietly. In October 2021 the Crown withdrew the hoax charge against Chaudhry after he entered into a peace bond carrying a year of conditions. He maintained that his mistakes came from immaturity rather than anything criminal. Nobody was convicted of anything, and the Peabody given for believing him had been back with the board for nearly ten months by the time the case closed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »