NYTimes Retracts ‘Caliphate’ Podcast

After an internal review that took more than two months, The New York Times has determined that “Caliphate,” its award-winning 2018 podcast, did not meet the standards for Times journalism.

The 12-part audio documentary featuring Rukmini Callimachi, a Times correspondent who has frequently reported from conflict zones, sought to shed light on the Islamic State terrorist group. The Times found that “Caliphate” gave too much credence to the false or exaggerated accounts of one of its main subjects, Shehroze Chaudhry, a resident of Canada who claimed to have taken part in Islamic State executions.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said the blame fell on the newsroom’s leaders, including himself.

“When The New York Times does deep, big, ambitious journalism in any format, we put it to a tremendous amount of scrutiny at the upper levels of the newsroom,” he said in a podcast interview that was posted by The Times on Friday.

“We did not do that in this case,” he continued. “And I think that I or somebody else should have provided that same kind of scrutiny, because it was a big, ambitious piece of journalism. And I did not provide that kind of scrutiny, nor did my top deputies with deep experience in examining investigative reporting.”

The Times started its review of “Caliphate” after Canadian authorities arrested Chaudhry on Sept. 25 and charged him with perpetrating a terrorist hoax. The Times said its investigation had “found a history of misrepresentations by Chaudhry and no corroboration that he committed the atrocities he described in the ‘Caliphate’ podcast. As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of ‘Caliphate’ that presented Chaudhry’s claims did not meet our standards for accuracy.”

The Editors’ Note described two main problems: The Times’s failure to assign an editor well versed in terrorism to keep a close watch on the series; and the “Caliphate” team’s lack of skepticism and rigor in its reporting on Mr. Chaudhry.

Every episode of “Caliphate” now begins with a correction read by Michael Barbaro, the host of The Daily podcast, who tells listeners that the chapters on Mr. Chaudhry “did not meet our standards for accuracy.”