An Examination of 'Caliphate'

Caliphate

The New York Times

Religion & Spirituality, News, History

4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, discusses where “Caliphate” failed to meet Times standards. And Mark Mazzetti, an investigative correspondent for The Times, details new reporting that casts significant doubt on the claims of a central figure in the series. Editors' Note: The Times has published an Editors’ Note concluding that episodes featuring a central character in “Caliphate” did not meet our standards for accuracy. Read the full statement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dean, to start, can you explain at the highest level what we're here to talk about today?
0:07.2	Yeah, certainly, Michael.
0:08.5	Thank you.
0:09.5	Well, first off, we're here to talk about a story that I believe we got wrong.
0:13.7	Mm-hmm.
0:14.7	And I think it's going to be important to explain why we got it wrong and just to talk about
0:18.7	it.
0:19.7	In 2018, we published Caliphate, which was an audio series about a Canadian man who claimed
0:26.9	to have spent several months in Syria as a low-level member of ISIS.
0:31.9	He said he did some awful acts like doling out lashings to people as punishment and killing
0:36.9	two men, stabbing one of them in the heart.
0:40.7	He called himself Abu Husayfah.
0:43.4	His real name was Shiro's Chaudhry.
0:46.4	This was a big story for us, a major story.
0:49.9	Then a few months ago, the Canadian government arrested him, charging him with a terrorism
0:55.2	hoax.
0:56.2	They essentially accused him of pretending to be a terrorist when he was not, which when
1:02.6	that happened, it raised the possibility that we had been doped.
1:07.4	So I set up a group of New York Times journalists who were tough-minded, who would tell me honestly
1:13.9	if we got it wrong.
1:15.9	And then separately, we set up a group of very good reporters led by a guy named Mark
1:20.6	Mazzetti who's a Pulitzer Prize winning intelligence reporter who would examine the
	...

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