On December 18, 2020, one of the most influential newspapers in America announced that it got an award-winning story wrong. Indeed, it was the New York Times and their ten-episode hit podcast series “Caliphate” about the Islamic State released in April 2018 — featuring an alleged ISIS member with accounts of gruesome atrocities and chilling insider knowledge of terrorist operations. On September 25, 2020, the source was charged by the Royal Canadian Police with perpetrating a terrorist hoax, forcing the Times to acknowledge their malpractice and prompt an internal investigation into the podcast series. As it turns out, all of the source’s claims — now retracted — had no independent accounts to substantiate the claims which “Caliphate” presented as fact.
The podcast series, hosted by the Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi, an award-winning terrorism beat reporter, uncovered the tale of the young Pakistani-Canadian man Shehroze Chaudhry. Under the pseudonym Abu Huzaifa, Chaudhry recounted his radicalization through ISIS internet pipelines, journey to Syria, and role as an executioner for the terrorist group before escaping its hold and returning to his home in Toronto, Canada. Chaudhry described on the podcast a multitude of gruesome events in visceral detail, including shooting one man through the head and stabbing another in the heart before hanging him to a cross. His inside look at the Islamic State was unprecedented: here was a notoriously difficult subject to cover, and the Times had found a former terrorist himself who could describe atrocities previously shrouded in speculation. Seven of “Caliphate’s” ten episodes were centered around Chaudhry, whom Callimachi reached out to through Instagram. “It’s an eye-opening account of his passage through the Islamic State,” Callimachi told CBC Television.
“Caliphate” broke grounds internationally. In 2019, the podcast series received a now-rescinded Overseas Press Club of America award and the Peabody Award, one of the highest distinctions in broadcast journalism. Callimachi was honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her reporting on the Islamic State, which included “Caliphate” as well as the “The ISIS Files,” a database of compiled translated documents that shed light on the inner workings of the organization. The series propelled Callimachi further into journalistic fame, brought in new paying subscribers for the Times, and introduced new listeners to their many podcasting projects.
The series also had considerable political traction. Upon “Caliphate’s” release, uproar ensued from Canadian Parliament. Candice Bergen, a Canadian Conservative party politician, attacked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government’s refusal to order law enforcement to arrest Chaudry. “Canadians deserve more answers from their government. Why is it not doing something about this despicable animal walking around the country?” Bergen demanded.
Yet, throughout this whirlwind of international fame, Chaundry had been making contradicting claims about his participation in terrorist activities and whether he had even travelled to Syria at all. On a series of occasions prior to the release of “Caliphate,” Chaudhry denied ever participating in the killings, only that he “witnessed violence on a scale he could never have imagined.” After the podcast’s release, Chaudry recanted the confessions he made to Callimachi and the Times in an interview with CBC, saying, “I was being childish. I was describing what I saw and, basically, I was close enough to think it was me.”
When Canadian law enforcement officials charged Chaudhry in September 2020 after conducting a nearly four-year investigation, they claimed their intelligence regarding Chaundry’s financial data, social media posts, and travel records made them confident that his accounts in “Caliphate” had been completely fabricated. The Times, on the other hand, failed to corroborate any of the stories they included in their podcast series.
Up until this point, the New York Times had resisted revisiting the “Caliphate” story, but were pressured to respond to the growing doubt surrounding Chaudhry upon his arrest. However, immediately following the charge, the Times remained supportive of his story. “The uncertainty about Abu Huzaifah’s story is central to every episode of ‘Caliphate’ that featured him,” a Times spokeswoman said in a statement on September 26, 2020, as if the credibility of an alleged terrorist’s story belonged to an entertainment series rather than a serious investigative reporting project.
The truth of the matter, however, unravelled once the Times conducted an internal review of “Caliphate’s” reporting, led by senior investigative editor Dean Murphy. Indeed, the investigation revealed that Chaudry — the essential figure in Callimachi’s reporting — was a fabulist, one who concocted gruesome jihadist stories to escape the normalcy of his suburban life in Toronto. In an interview with NPR, Times executive editor Dean Baquet admitted that the Times in fact had no evidence that Chaudry went to Syria or even joined ISIS, his story filled with contradictions and flaws. According to Baquet, Murphy found that Callimachi and her editors repeatedly failed to dispute claims made by Chaudhry.
“Caliphate,” no matter how riveting its tales, was an institutional and journalistic failure, and no one could deny it. The Times returned its Peabody award and Pulitzer honors, citing “failure to meet editorial standards,” and reassigned Calimachi, its most prominent terrorism reporter, to a new beat — higher education. It issued an apology and released a special episode to “Caliphate” featuring Baquet and famed “The Daily” host Michael Barbaro, in which they discussed how the Times could have made such an extreme violation of journalistic integrity.
In the episode, Baquet mused, “I think we fell in love with our story.” He insisted that they were so determined to publish this captivating account from an ISIS terrorist that the producers of the show developed a “confirmation bias.” At the time, the Times supposedly saw a compelling case for the accuracy of Chaudhry’s story, with him being on a no-fly list and radicalization experts and sources of American intelligence in the government buying his claims. Yet, it still seems rather baffling that their bias would supersede the requirement that there be at least one independent source to corroborate the claims that Chaudhry made — and there were none.
The institution was not the only subject of significant backlash. The reporters and producers involved were also hit with heavy criticism — especially among the journalism community —, to which they responded with individual statements. On December 18, 2020, Callimachi issued an apology to listeners of “Caliphate” on Twitter: “To our listeners, I apologize for what we missed and what we got wrong. We are correcting the record and I commit to doing better in the future.” And while Callimachi admitted her faults as a journalist, her colleague Andy Mills took a more brazen path: resignation. On February 5, Mills, the producer of “Caliphate,” issued a lengthy 1000-word letter on his personal website detailing his decision to leave the Times.
In his letter, Mills cited his decision to resign with “the pressure of this online campaign” and the “extraordinarily painful” experience he endured through the “Caliphate” backlash. He began by reflecting emotionally on his journey of becoming a journalist and the important work he’d done for the Times, but then shifting the “Caliphate” controversy towards his victimhood. “Times’ leadership told us that they had their own internal system in place for stories of this nature,” he wrote. “That system broke down.”
In deflecting blame, Mills emphasized on his lack of authority in the Times’ system for fact-checking. He described his role as someone who simply “helped create and produce the podcast,” despite being the series’ main producer. To make matters worse, Mills included four paragraphs in his letter about Twitter, allegations of predatory behavior, male entitlement, and other topics completely unrelated to “Caliphate” that he found “especially discouraging and upsetting,” that eventually led to his resignation. “I have been transformed to a symbol of larger societal evils,” he declared.
Mills used media criticism as a cheap scapegoat, along with resignation, to evade accountability for the failures of “Caliphate.” His letter leaves you almost feeling as if Mills has too, become a victim of the ruthless, baseless “cancel culture” that many politicians claim ravages American society. Josh Barro, a New York magazine columnist and host of the podcast Left, Right, & Center, criticized the letter, saying it “leaned into the culture-war related aspect of the dispute to draw attention away from the issue of presiding over a serious journalistic mistake.”
Barro is right. Certainly, readers should demand accountability from the reporters and producers who carry the power of delivering their stories, and the conversations about Callimachi and Mills’ responses are immensely important for that reason. Ultimately, the reporters and producers involved failed the public in their journalistic duty to report the truth, and there is no escaping it, no matter how Mills frames his experience as a Twitter-victim.
Conversely, however, that acknowledgement should also not detract from the larger issue that the Times allowed such an unacceptable series to ever be published. These mistakes reflect the failed journalistic protocols and priorities in the institution, and “Caliphate,” an exceptionally ambitious project that attempted to integrate storytelling with investigative reporting about the Islamic State, helped reveal those breakdowns in the Times.
Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor in chief of The Chicago Tribune who runs the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard explained: “Narrative journalism can be perilous. That’s a certain kind of storytelling that is much valued and does have this built-in entertainment quality, but you can never sacrifice the reporting to that.” That sacrifice is precisely what occurred in “Caliphate.”
The creators of “Caliphate” were looking for a story to tell the public, one that was revealing and compelling, and that desire allowed confirmation bias to influence their coverage. It moved them towards narratives that provided the story they wanted to hear and looked past the evidence that said otherwise. These very practices led to its downfall, and they demonstrate a neglect of one of the most basic principles of the journalism profession and industry.
Baquet put it this way: “In the end, good journalism comes from some sort of internal debate over whether or not the stuff that supports the story is more powerful than the stuff that refutes the story. I think this is one of those cases where I think we just didn’t listen hard enough to the stuff that challenged the story.” The “Caliphate” series became an exemplification of these perils of irresponsible journalism — a failure in fact-checkers, in listening to the “stuff that challenged the story.” In doing so, the Times did a disservice not only to their audiences, but their credibility as an institution.
