New York Times retracts core of podcast series ‘Caliphate’ | Hacker News Reader

New York Times retracts core of podcast series ‘Caliphate’

npr.org

313 pointsRickJWagner353 comments

Is retracting enough?

So a news story gets out, millions read it, share or watch it. Then NYT retracts it. Maybe adding a footnote or correction (sometimes they don't even do that [1]) is added to the story. Maybe the story is removed from their site.

However, the faulty information has already registered into the minds of millions of people.

NYT has already intentionally or unintentionally indoctrinated the minds of many readers and with the "retraction" at the same time they can claim the highest standards of journalism.

Unless in good fait, NYT tries to bring as much attention into the correction to the readers they have already impacted, the retraction is journalistic virtue signaling and a very small victory for truth.

Even if they do as much work in publicizing the retraction so many people have already formed a biased view and it'll be hard to undo that.

The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.

[1] https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187036978463891456

They put the retraction in the podcast feed, which I'm guessing most people who listened to the series are still subscribed to.

If the podcast stopped posting new episodes, a lot of people will miss a new one.

Most podcast apps stop auto-downloading dead feeds.

They also advertised it in The Daily, one of the most popular podcasts around, which is how I heard about it since I unsubbed from the Caliphate feed (as it was finished).

EDIT: Most charts put it at #2 in US [0].

[0] https://chartable.com/charts/itunes/us-all-podcasts-podcasts

EDIT2: They also wrote a full column in the NYT itself.

There also ought to be an economic incentive, for example refunds to paying readers.

It is interesting to me that (for a podcast at least) there’s presumably more than enough data available somewhere to send a notification of the retraction if NYT was so inclined. Surely iTunes, Spotify, etc. could identify the vast majority of people who downloaded and listened to these episodes. How come my data is only used to target me when it’s beneficial to these major companies and not when it’s beneficial to me?

> How come my data is only used to target me when it’s beneficial to these major companies and not when it’s beneficial to me?

This is a glib answer, but it’s because there’s no incentive (financial or otherwise) for these companies to do that

> Is retracting enough?

That's the modern propaganda M.O. Lie and then retract and demand praise for retracting.

Go look up Nayirah's testimony where a kuwaiti diplomat's daughter lied about iraqi soldiers killing "incubator babies" and the media, working with government, spread the lies intentionally to start the first iraq war.

Go read about the nonexistent WMDs that the media like the NYT lied about to start the 2nd iraq war.

> The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.

That's not going to anything. The news industry "recycles" journalists/editors like the catholic church recycles pedophile priests.

People should simply be taught what Thomas Jefferson knew. "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day"

The problem is that people expect truth and facts from the news industry. People should be taught what the news industry is - a propaganda outlet for the elites. And then let the people judge accordingly. The NYTimes will always be a corrupt agenda driven propaganda organization. You can't change that. What you can change are people's understanding of what the NYTimes is.

I oftentimes wonder why people want to defend the NYT and the only conclusion I can come up with is that they mistakenly believe they're part of the elite.

Simple defense mechanism. They were raised in educated households where its reporting was considered on practically its own epistemological plane of journalism, its writing standards a model around which to improve their own, and it's just really hard to face the fact that an institution you idolized has flaws, because it means you have to admit you were fooled.

The fact that we're even talking about the credibility of the NYT already places it on a higher epistemological plane than the mainstream media (TV news, social media, etc).

You wrap yourself up in your conspiracy theories and your "real truths" and judge the entirety of journalism to be a bad faith operation, that their is no nuance, no good individual actors in the system. That's why I downvote rants and nonsense.

Here's what's on nytimes.come right now:

- UK imposes harsher crackdown in London

- Moderna's vaccine will be shipped next week across the US

- Pompeo says Russia was behind the SolarWinds hack

I'm not going to conclude from this that the UK relaxed its lockdown, the vaccine will not be shipped, and Pompeo said Russia was not behind the hack.

The happy medium is: know when a newspaper was in a position to know the truth and trust them if they were, or if the article explains its evidentiary basis in convincing detail.

I found this to be a good description of what to watch out for https://youtu.be/v-8t0EfLzQo

It's not even whether they're telling you a true thing, it's the story they tell around it

> Here's what's on nytimes.come right now:

What's your point? You could make the same argument on every propaganda outlet. Do the same thing for fox news, xinhua, al jazeera, rt, etc.

It's naive to think that propaganda necessarily means lies. It's half-truths, excessive coverage, ignoring of topics, etc.

> The happy medium is: know when a newspaper was in a position to know the truth and trust them if they were, or if the article explains its evidentiary basis in convincing detail.

No. That's the childish naive view. You should know that every newspaper is an agenda driven propaganda organization serving the interests of the elites ( after all it is the elites who created these newspapers ) and judge accordingly. No newspaper is deserving of trust or should be trusted because their primarly goal is to deceive. Anyone who trusts a newspaper or a politician is a moron at this point. Just take everything they say with a grain of salt and move on.

Certainly the last thing one should do is worship the NY Times which many here sadly do. But then again old people are their target demographic. Easily scared and insecure.

The fact that you are being down-voted just by acknowledging something that is not controversial at all, illustrates clearly how the elites are winning heavily the battle on the narrative of current affairs. The media should not be trusted, AT ALL.They have their own interests and agendas , very different, from the ones of a common citizen.Never forget that.

You are right, but what the hell is one to do? There are no credible media organizations with the resources of the NYT.

So you link to Tim Pool?!

Holy agenda pushing...

> Holy agenda pushing...

Mind explaining that?

Tim Pool is a fringe right-wing media figure who has little interest in seeking out the truth.

Tim frequently shared stories with no truth to them, eg. 2020 Election fraud. He also frequently tells his listeners to distrust the “Democrat Media”. His arguments would typically be considered in bad faith on HN. Linking to Timcast from and article about the NYT is definitely pushing an agenda.

I wonder if podcasts are a much riskier medium because of this. When have 12 episodes drilling in ideas based on a faulty premise, it's a lot harder to effectively say "oops," and being longer, there are a lot more opportunities for something to go wrong.

> they can claim the highest standards of journalism

Just keep these failures in mind any time in the future NYT is quoted. They don’t deserve

One reporter's mistakes don't invalidate a whole newsroom.

99.9% of the time the NYT's scoops are subsequently verified by other news organisations in short order.

They have been doing this over and over a lot about tech reporting. Borderline malicious reporting by omitting key details to paint whatever narrative they want.

Why? They see tech as a direct competitor and want as much smearing as they can.

So, it is not a isolated incident.

> Why? They see tech as a direct competitor and want as much smearing as they can.

That's absolute nonsense. How in the world does the NY Times compete directly with Facebook, Google, Spotify etc? There's a bit of indirect competition (ad revenue, podcast viewership) but nothing direct.

99.9% of domestic stories that are easier to verify. NYT has plenty of wiggle room abroad, especially when the domestic audience can't understand the language of the region covered.

Here's a recent example that NYT ended up getting pretty wrong: Finland, ‘Prepper Nation of the Nordics,’ Isn’t Worried About Masks

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus-...

When we (Finland) actually opened the famed stockpiles, we found we had protective gear for about next 3 weeks. The cited chief executive of Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency, Mr. Lounema ended up promptly resigning, and the whole case was a big scandal in Finnish news for several weeks:

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/stockpile_boss_resigns_af...

https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000006469197.html

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11302248

https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/jutut/kotimaa/mielipide-kotimaa/v...

It's not the sort of article for which you'd typically issue a retraction, since there are no incorrect figures cited and they are honest about the limits of their reporting:

There is little publicly available information on the number of masks and other supplies that Finland has or where exactly they are stored.

I'm not sure they are even wrong to have used that rosy, positive tone about Finland's PPE stockpile. Compared to the United States, Finland seem to have had things relatively under control in terms of supplies?

I mean, compared to the United States, Finland seems to have done pretty well since somebody who screwed up actually lost their job. Consider the difference in point of view: our federal government were screwing up constantly with PPE supplies and nobody ever resigned. All a topic for a different story, I guess.

Crisis is coming. Will country X have it in control? Let's ask some top politicians and government agency directors, do you think you'll have it in control? Of course they are going to answer yes. Let's run a big story: "Country X has crisis in control". What is the value of news like this?

What if in March, a Finnish news agency had interviewed US president Trump's office and maybe US CDC Director Dr. Redfield, asked them if US has the pandemic situation in control, and after they replied yes, then ran a story "US has pandemic in control"? Would you say that's ok – after all they'd be honest about the limits of their reporting, and are just citing their sources.

I'm not sure we have a big disagreement. These sorts of stories are stupid, but in my view, they're just not worthy of retraction because they don't break the rules or tell outright falsehoods. At least not when they're standalone stories. On the other hand, if the NYT ran a large number of stories like this, not blatantly untrue but offering too rosy a picture of the preparedness of the Finnish government as part of a big campaign to alter public opinion, that would be more of an attempt at deception, and more of a problem. I'm not sure why they'd do that, but we could point at analogous series of stories they've done over the last 30 years. (An awful lot of the NYT's behavior in the early 2000s was fairly awful, even when it was superficially within journalistic standards.)

> What if in March, a Finnish news agency had interviewed US president Trump's office and maybe US CDC Director Dr. Redfield, asked them if US has the pandemic situation in control, and after they replied yes, then ran a story "US has pandemic in control"? Would you say that's ok – after all they'd be honest about the limits of their reporting, and are just citing their sources.

Some of it is about trusting the reader. I would be disappointed in a Finnish reporter who left the US government's employee's rosy assessment unchallenged in the absence of evidence, and in a Finnish editor who decided to run the story, but in 2020, I'd be disappointed in the reader who took such claims by the US Government seriously without evidence.

> they don't break the rules or tell outright falsehoods They don’t but that hardly qualifies as “highest standard of journalism”

No argument here.

NYT: Europe == good; Asia == shit

I can’t claim any number so I don’t. I would love to see how you came up with that number, can you share source?

It is very different from my experience

Did you listen to the podcast? Because I can't relate at all to this reaction, given nuanced take of the original series.

The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.

The second half of the series follows the reporter as she tries to corroborate the story she was told, and weighs the evidence she sees against her own knowledge. In the end the implication is that she believes part of his story is probably true, but never expresses certainty.

I didn't come away thinking I'd necessarily heard the personal account of an ISIS member. Rather, I felt that I learned a lot about the process of investigative journalism, and how incredibly difficult it is to confirm information in wartime.

The fact that it's even being retracted at all seems like overkill to me, and I think that in a different climate, where the integrity of the NYT wasn't under so much scrutiny, the response would have been more measured.

But generally, news orgs don't commit to doing huge year-long projects/investigations into something they know to be fake. Or, if they do, the story is about the fakery (and the psychology/personality of the person behind it) – it doesn't attempt to pass it off as "maybe true".

The average investigative reporter receives tons of bullshit or otherwise overhyped leads. It benefits no one to elevate each of those into a prestige project.

But the reporter believed it was most likely that part of the story was true. There was corroboration from sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS, and the photo he had on his phone that was taken in Syria.

In retrospect, they are saying the needle moved from "more likely true" to "more likely fabricated."

In any case the story he was telling was believable, and painted a realistic picture of what was happening in the region.

So it's not nearly so black and white

> 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 killed 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.

At this point, you can either believe NPR, "his story was not fact-checked at all", or the New York Times, "we did our due diligence."

One is telling the truth, and the other is lying. You can't believe them both without descending into doublethink.

I mean, they both can be true if the NYT is just really incompetent at fact checking.

That the reporter was credulous enough to believe the faker's story to be "most likely" true is the very thing that she needs to answer for.

Sorry, but "sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS" is just not a foundation of evidence, especially since the NYT refuse to describe the sources beyond the vaguest of terms (e.g. we have no idea whether one U.S. source is just agreeing that he's heard rumors from another U.S. source). Do we really need to reiterate the long history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy doing things like putting children on the no-fly list?

The main thing that matters is the documentable evidence that the NYT had access to. Like his passport stamps and social media. To quote from the NYT's investigation [0]:

> But far from proving Mr. Chaudhry’s jihadist bona fides, at least one of the pictures was a brazen copy of widely available news photography, The Times’s examination found. The original image had been taken months earlier by a photographer for the official Russian news agency, Tass, and had been distributed by Getty Images, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of photographs...

> Other images Mr. Chaudhry provided as evidence that he had gone to Syria — specifically, snapshots he said he had taken of armed men at the beach, whom he described as his “fellow fighters” — also proved to be identical to photographs that had been posted on Twitter years before by Syrian antiwar activists, The Times’s examination found. And as with other images, Mr. Chaudhry misrepresented — or perhaps didn’t actually know — where, and sometimes when, they had been taken.

So either the NYT went ahead with publishing this full fledged project knowing that Mr. Chaudhry, the subject, had stolen photos and claimed them as his own. Or, they went ahead and accepted his social media photos as evidence, without even doing a cursory reverse image search – which is unconscionable given the severe and immediate doubts raised by Mr. Chaudhry's passport.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

Journalism is the act of hunting for truth. I don't think any reputable outlet goes into an investigation knowing what the outcome is going to be. Journalists are good at looking at evidence and identifying possible outcomes and many times their assumptions turn out to be true after rigorous research, but this is different then knowing what an outcome of a story is going to be.

Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.

Here are the Pulitzers for International Reporting, for which "Caliphate" was a finalist in 2019:

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/210

I challenge you to find another winner or finalist in this category in which the truth value of the published assertions is portrayed as merely optional.

> Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.

Well, it's what the original Serial did. That format has inspired a lot of the podcasting world.

For starters, Serial is universally regarded as an exceptional project – i.e. the exception that proves the rule – and a project that has always been under a considerable amount of controversy. In any case, the podcast itself never insinuated that it could make a case for Adnan Syed's innocence. And more relevant with respect to Caliphate, the foundational facts are not in doubt: Adnan Syed was indeed the ex-boyfriend of the victim, and he was indeed convicted of her murder and serving a life sentence.

I haven't listened to the podcast.

Can I ask, how would you feel about conspiracy videos doing the same thing? Those that present a conspiracy and then show a reporter trying to verify the theory that ends with the reporter indicating they believe "part of [the] story is probably true, but never expresses certainty." I just can't help think that if the topic was aliens or 9/11 instead of the Caliphate and the author was fox news or reason magazine, you'd consider it drivel.

I can't remember what it was, but I feel I've seen such documentaries or podcasts before. As long as it's done in good faith, I'm happy about it. Like if you don't get the impression they're actually trying to convince you of anything, but are more just welcoming you through their own process of learning about something and then ending with a bit of an ambiguous, well I still don't know for sure one way or another, but maybe there is more substance than I thought at first.

Edit: I didn't actually listen to Caliphate though, so I don't know if it appears done in good faith or not.

Well, that's certainly not the way I feel. If aliens haven't been visiting humans for years, I don't want to watch a video going through the process of learning about the possibility that they might have been visiting humans for years and then ending a bit ambiguous.

I don't think this was anything like that, though.

The story that they were investigating was completely plausible because it painted a very realistic picture of things that were happening in Syria at the time.

I suppose the one part of this that is potentially harmful and false is that the ISIS member was living free in Toronto (while bragging about it on social media).

Plausibe is fine to a point. The context here is journalism, and with that comes responsibilities. The fact an outfit as reputable as NYT chose not to fulfill its obligations should give anyone reasonable pause. This was a relatively meaningless story. What happens when something more significant is involed? And the stakes (read: possible revenue) higher?

I suspect your idea of 'very realistic' is from news sources like the NYT and not from actually being to Syria.

As someone who has been to Syria multiple times, I can assure you that US news is much closer to Hollywood than reality.

> The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.

Maybe don't do that in a newspaper (or related media) that purports to be about factual subjects, and keep it in your memoirs. The NYT was Curveball's main outlet (through Judith Miller) so maybe they were just feeling nostalgic.

The meat of the story wasn’t even this guy’s account. I think it was then finding a cache of administrative documents from somewhere in Iraq and having a deep look into ISIS government, its operations etc.

Beyond just abstractly infiltrating minds, this story directly bolstered real policy changes with real consequences for Canadian asylum seekers including children.

This whole thing is shameful and embarrassing, or at least it should be.

I recommend reading what folks like Laila Al-Alarian and other non-NYT folks have been saying about this cf*k for some time:

https://twitter.com/PeterHamby/status/1340022426223034370?s=...

https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1339998015399088129?s=2...

https://twitter.com/LailaAlarian/status/1340002570404806656?...

Also worth looking into Rukmini’s funding sources and how she was vaulted into this position of primacy for an eye into the geopolitical machinations that lead to this sort of thing playing out.

Personally I subscribe to the NYT and I only heard about this story because of the retraction and investigation that they published in the newspaper. So at least from my perspective as a NYT customer, they have done enough to let me know they messed up here. They've also reassigned the journalist to another beat, which isn't loss of a job, but fact-checking is a team effort and I don't think it's fair for a journalist to bear the entire brunt of the fallout.

Same here, I'm a paying NYT subscriber, never heard the podcast, but I did see the multiple stories of the retraction on the front page. I would argue far MORE people heard of the retraction than ever listened to the original podcast.

> Is retracting enough?

No. They need to fire Rukmini. Just because she is considered a "superstar" in the newsroom doesn't mean she gets off the hook for embarrassing the company with a debunked project.

I'm not sure that's the thing they need to do.

What i want is a post mortem. What went wrong in their organization that let it through, and what changes are they going to make to ensure it doesn't happen again?

That seem ridiculous and unfair. Feels akin to fixing a security breach by firing the dev who introduced the vulnerability. What they need to do is adopt better processes and put mechanism in place for things like that not to happen again, no matter who the journalist would be.

> Feels akin to fixing a security breach by firing the dev who introduced the vulnerability.

How big is the breach? If it's a minor incident, sure, keep the dev. However, if the dev introduced a breach that caused the company millions of dollars in damages and likely an outside investigation, then that dev will likely be fired for incompetence.

> That seem ridiculous and unfair.

Not at all. That's how the media industry works: Factual errors are a cardinal sin.

The New York Times is the one of the most prestigious journalistic institutions in the world, one who touts its "Paper of Record" title with a reputation for thorough and accurate reporting.

Rukmini, Andy Mills, and their editors are expected to abide by those standards. With Caliphate, that went out the window. Not to mention the numerous red flags raised by other reporters and editors within The Times' Foreign team that pointed to questionable reporting and sourcing by to Rukmini.

Caliphate has collapsed under its weak reporting, forcing The Times to revoke and return several prestigious awards, including a Peabody and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, an embarrassing look for the paper. And, for that, heads should roll, from Rukmini and Mills to the editors overseeing the project.

However, this likely won't happen. Rukmini has already been reassigned to another section and will likely continue her work (in reality, The Times won't let go of one its "star" reporters, and Rukmini won't find a more lucrative gig at a news organization with as much prestige and resources than The Times). Mills, however, will likely be fired, and not because of Caliphate: There are reports of Mills' predatory behavior toward young, female journalists, and many of them are coming forward. The outcry will likely reach a fever pitch and likely lead to his resignation next year.

For what it's worth, I did see the retraction displayed fairly prominently below the fold on nytimes.com yesterday. So they're not trying to bury it, at least.

I subscribe to the NYT, but it's not the only thing I read. The retraction was plastered all over in the press.

Just listened to most of this earlier. I don't quite get it.

IIRC, the original series did treat Chaudhry as dubious, but maybe partially truthful . He was caught on a timeline lie, confronted by the journalist, he adjusted his timeline... Also, the whole series was constructed somewhat naively. It follows the journalist's investigations sequentially. The "story" follows leads and narratives that do or don't turn out to be true. You're following an investigation in progress. In that frame, this is just further evidence as the story continues.

Caliphate just isn't framed as a traditional print "feature" where the journalist weighs everything in advance and only references fact-checked reliable evidence once they're done.

I actually felt that caliphate did a better-than-most job at communicating shades of certainty. I wish the NYT did more of this. Journalistic standards are good tools, but they do not (should not, IMO) just sort everything into "true" or "unverified" piles and . Uncertainty about truth is inevitable. Communicate this well, honestly, and we'll all be better informed.

This felt like way more than a retraction. Maybe they're using it as a "teaching moment" about how journalism works. I don't love it though. I can think of much better targets for NYT mea culpa or soul search. Caliphate is not a low watermark for journalism in any way. Maybe I'm missing something.

If they (or any major paper) is feeling reflective, why not reflect on more systemic questions. How about double confirmed rumours from anonymous sources? Two sources, even if both remain nameless and have a personal interest in leaking to the press is considered fine.. I believe. This is common in political reporting. Stuff gets leaked. Journalists get confirmation from another insider.. maybe two. That can be printed. If it turns out to be a fallacious rumour, they still "met standards." Maybe they print a retraction, but no one did anything wrong. Meanwhile, this is the cause of many untruths getting published each year.

> He was caught on a timeline lie, confronted by the journalist, he adjusted his timeline

The fact that they kept going after this (and didn't investigate further) is when you start having serious issues. You can see her attacking the Canadian police once it starts coming to light more and more that he was lying - she was attached to the story (and the fame) and didn't want to hear otherwise. [0]

I am glad that the NYT retracted it, this was a good move, but I think this ought to be career-ending for her.

[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032

Just by it happening, it's already career-limiting. I'm not sure every even serious screw up needs to result in a firing squad. That said, this is certainly in the category of things that can certainly end up that way at a major news org. See also Rathergate.

> Just by it happening, it's already career-limiting

Oh absolutely - and I don't think she shouldn't necessarily be a journalist/storyteller anymore (clearly has somewhat of a knack for it) but not at a NYT/Wapo/WSJ.

For all the heat those pubs get, my personal experience with them is that they're pretty meticulous with their reporting. (Which of course doesn't mean they don't sometimes miss the bigger picture even if their facts as reported are correct.)

I had a total nothingburger quote in the WSJ a bit back and the whole process took 2 phone discussions, some back and forth messaging, and a fact check on email (presumably to put on record). For something that was completely banal.

Maybe I came off as more definitive than I intended. I agree with the retraction. It was required, but it's really more of a follow-on than a retraction. An apology to Canadian police is more necessary, probably. That's a no-fault too though, in my estimation. They had to keep quiet while investigating, and temporarily absorb criticism. That's a hazard of the job though.

I see nothing wrong with this tweet, never mind "career-ending."

"1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm"

Shades of uncertainty. This is honest journalism. Whether or not she felt overconfident in any given detail or narrative, the we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.

I am not a journalist. I can tell from that podcast that there are reasons for the strong reaction that look different from a journalistic perspective and a layman's one. I think the difference (to me) is frame.

If in episode 3, she totally believes his account and by episode 6 she's dubious... that's the nature of doing investigative journalism as a temporal series.

> he we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.

They might "complicate the narrative" but they're putting it out there as being at least partially true when it was actually entirely false. It isn't "honest" journalism to keep putting out your sensationalized stories with just a little added "narrative tension."

> I see nothing wrong with this tweet

Read the entire thread - she is basically suggesting that the reason they didn't charge him is because they are incompetent.

Both of my parents are former editors at major national publications. My mom has had to fire people for stuff like this. They think that this was a breach of journalistic integrity and pretty much career-ending.

>>they're putting it out there as being at least partially true when it was actually entirely false.

We know now that it was entirely false. She didn't at the time. The flak at Canadian police had to take is regrettable. They were investigating, had to keep quiet, and couldn't "clear their name" for several months. She owes an apology, but that's somewhat outside of "The Caliphate" itself.

Look... I realize that my take on this is contradictory to journalistic norms. Maybe there is actual tension between practicable "journalistic integrity" and my layman's definition of "honest" journalism.

Frame matters a lot. If you are printing a single column article summarizing the Chaudery saga, standard "journalist integrity" makes a lot of sense. Not verified enough. The primary source is lying about some stuff at least. Don't print.

If you are making an audio series that follows a journalist on investigation... This allows for shades of uncertainty. Callimachi is very confident in the source at first. Later, she catches him on some lies. By the end, he's clearly a dubious source at best. I don't think you can summarize this as "putting it out there." This isn't a Reuters wire. You can have ambiguity.

She should not have jumped to the conclusion that Canadian police were inept. That was bad instincts, and an investigative failure resulted.

In any case, I'm not saying it's journalistically perfect. I'm just shocked that it is being treated as a low watermark. I feel like a lot of reporting can and does clear a "journalistic integrity" hurdle, but scores much lower than Callimachi in my estimation of "honest journalism." I guess we value different things.

Tangent: something about this thread is making me think of "The Wire," All the lines about "good police work."

> The fact that they kept going after this (and didn't investigate further) is when you start having serious issues

Honestly, the biggest error they mentioned in the correction in my opinion was with the photos. Turns out they ended up reverse image searching some of the photos he had posted, and many of them were stolen from other sources. That right there would've been another huge red flag.

As other people have said, she'll probably fail upwards. Others in the past have tried to stop her from, well, lying, and have failed, even more so, those people have seen their career negatively affected by that. Via /r/syriancivilwar/ I've come across this article from 2018 [1] which detailed how the former NYTimes Baghdad correspondent Margaret Coker lost her job because she had tried to stop Callimachi.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/...

Ah yes, my parents (who are former national editors) had told me about this sort of discontent among bureau chiefs around her, although they didn't name the particular names.

Yeah, this was my reaction as well. The reason I found Caliphate interesting was not the details of Chaudhry's story, which I experienced as were portrayed as dubious and in need of verification throughout; I certainly finished the podcast feeling uncertain whether Chaudhry had actually done any of the things he claimed.

Instead, the reason I've recommended this podcast to friends is that it spends most of its time on a fascinating exploration of the journalistic process. How does reporter verify claims made by people about events in a war zone? The people you interview have a reason to lie to you, sneaking across borders doesn't generate passport stamps, and reliable records are hard to come by.

This latest news feels like an interesting addendum to all that; I'd have expected any other podcast publisher to do an additional episode or two covering the new evidence and grappling with what that changes about the conclusions one can draw (certainly Serial has done a number of updates on new evidence about its past stories).

That said, my sense is that the NYT is taking this extreme action in part because they in retrospect are unhappy with the fact-checking process for the podcast, and I could see that sort of concern motivating this type of retraction/disowning despite all the uncertainty the podcast itself presented.

>> Also, the whole series was constructed somewhat naively.

I would use the word naively if it weren't journalist Rukmini Callimachi, who has created her entire career on the basis of secret terrorism in the Muslim community. At this point, that is her entire narrative and she finds anything to support it and ignores whatever doesnt support this specific narrative.

Interestingly, he never covers similar things in other religious communities and focuses only on Muslims. She is this generation's Daniel Pipes.

Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance

I don't mean "naively" in the "the author is neutral" sense.

I mean that it is not framed like an encyclopedia or conventional investigative journalism print. It is framed as the story of the investigation. It isn't "my conclusions after investigating this for 2 years." This frames has a lot of room for shades of uncertainty than conventional ones.

In that sense, this is actually a better

Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade. Ot's normal that careers are made on the biggest story of a decade.

I'm not saying she has no biases. Journalists have biases. Political biases, biases to certain archetypal narratives, the importance or truth of their own story, etc. But, moreso than most, Caliphate did portray a detail rich picture. You can make your own judgements with facts she provides, even if they are different to hers. That's honest journalism.

>>Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance

I guess this is the reason I wrote the comment originally. It's disingenuous to portray this as a low watermark for NYT (or most other big newsorgs). There are many worse offences.

Since you are comparing to fox news and balance, I assume you are comparing to "opinion reporting," and such. If we include that, then half the ship is under water. Opinion writing is outside of the journalistic standards allegedly violated here. But by layman standards, Callimachi is far more honest and balanced than any opinion at NYT... and obviously cable news stuff.

>> Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade.

This is pretty circular logic. Her topics are newsworthy because she is covering them, and adjacent un-covered topics happen to become not-newsworthy because she is ignoring them. The NYT editorial staff is def at fault, but she is she, as their designated "Terrorism Reporter [who only covers a certain type of terrorism]" She literally gets to define terrorism by example and undefine it by what she ignores to cover.

As an example, most people in the US I've spoken to dont consider the 2011 Norway attacks "terrorism" because they have not been covered as such. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks) The coverage makes the news and everything else disappears into history when the supposed paper of record conveniently ignores part of the narrative.

As an another example, consider the Russian-Chechnyan conflict.

If the newspaper decides to cover only Russian atrocities, that becomes the news and that is how popular opinion forms and that is what drives US foreign policy.

If instead the newspaper decides to cover only Chechnyan atrocities, that becomes the news and that is how popular opinion forms and that is what drives US foreign policy.

>>This is pretty circular logic. Her topics are newsworthy because she is covering them, and adjacent un-covered topics happen to become not-newsworthy because she is ignoring them.

Who's logic is circular here? ..or do you mean that reality follows a circular logic?

I totally agree that some news is "media generated" and newsworthiness becomes circular. Celebrity news, a lot of political news, some hard news cause celebre. Plenty of room for gray area and disagreement about which news issue qualifies as "media generated."

OTOH, reality still exists. Not everything is media generated. The moon landing was objectively newsworthy at the highest level. A national election is objectively newsworthy. So is the rise of ISIS, the successful recruitment of so many volunteers from so many places. Practices within their territory. The scale, impact, etc of the "caliphate" story make it totally newsworthy. More than any other terrorism/radicalism/insurgency/cult story of the decade by a long mile.

That's the topic of Caliphate. "Abu Huzafya" is not the story. He is a (false) character in the story. A detail. He wouldn't have been newsworthy in his own right even if he had been real. ISIS was the story.

There was a "media generated" local, side narrative about "why is this guy free?" Canadian police couldn't clear it up straight away, because the investigation was still going. Unfortunate, technically "media generated.... but ultimately irrelevant to any big picture.

"Baquet says the Times did not have evidence Chaudhry had ever been to Syria"

How do you fail to do even the most basic fact checking? They've clearly learned nothing since Judith Miller.

Does it matter? The NYT is not as relevant as it was in the near past, nevermind a generation or two ago.

And the NYT has no standard for peer review, and in the digital age routinely edits its works after publication without any discernible changelog. See the 1619 scandal.

It does matter. The NY has actually grown its subscriber base during the Trump years and remains a major cultural force. Witness the immediate take down of Pornhub after a single article in the NYT, after conservative activists had spent years railing the exact same issue. For better of for worst, mostly for worst, the NYT remains a powerful force, long after it lost any semblance of journalistic integrity.

> any semblance of journalistic integrity

First sentence of the article:

> The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags

Clearly it would have been better for them to have done their jobs correctly in the first place, but in what way are they not displaying journalistic integrity in this instance? Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.

Mistakes are inevitable (though in this case avoidable). Owning up to publishing something erroneous is the way you display journalistic integrity. I'll trust what you tell me today, if I can trust you to tell me the details you got wrong tomorrow.

> an internal review

Yeah that's their spin on the story, the reality is that they got busted though.

Several years ago, Rolling Stone published story about a rape that allegedly occurred at a University of Virginia fraternity.

It was the Washington Post and not Rolling Stone themselves that discovered holes in the story. But Rolling Stone owned up to it and engaged the Columbia School of Journalism to investigate the lapses in their reporting and fact-checking processes, resulting in a damning report which RS published in a subsequent issue.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/rolling-st...

I don't expect NYT to be perpetually fact checking stories after publication, but when they "get busted," I absolutely expect them to re-investigate and publish their findings.

Rolling Stone absolutely did not "own up to it," they repeatedly tried to minimize the damage the article had done to the individuals and groups portrayed in it, and further, even after the Columbia report, stood by all its editors, fact-checkers, and even the writer herself!

A good summary: https://web.archive.org/web/20150410094429/http://www.bloomb...

> Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.

Ultimately, whether she stays on their payroll is the decider for me as to whether they have journalistic integrity.

I was discussing this with my parents (both former editors of major publications) who have had to fire people for creating composite characters like this. The lack of basic fact checking, followed up by attacking the Canadian authorities [0] once it started to come to light that the story was untrue is very unsavory. I think this should be career-ending.

[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032

I’m not sure if that take down says more about the NYT or the current levels of political polarization.

The Times is still pretty much THE newspaper in the US, if not the English-speaking world.

I would emphasize NEWSPAPER instead of the 'the'. Not many folks reading newspapers these days.

Similar to how many people just up vote or down vote a comment. It is far easier to believe something you want to be true than to believe something you don't want to be true.

We all do this. Most of the time its harmless but when it is a news organization it can become harmful and there will still be people who believe the story is true or that it is based on a truth.

Fortunately the internet has given us more of both, the stories we want to be true but are not and the stories that are true we wish there we not. Now we have many more eyes on both so that they can be called out for what they are.

It's worth listening to the 30 minute explanation on their podcast feed if you want a legitimate explanation to that question. They really try to account for it.

They relied on the gut-check from other terrorism experts, what was publicly available about Canada's investigation, and got a verification from a field commander in ISIS who said that he remembered the fraudster but the fraudster didn't serve directly under him like he had claimed. In retrospect, the hook of the story was so strong that they hadn't subjected it to the level of scrutiny of their other ambitious projects. He contrasted it with the Trump tax return story, where he had personally reviewed so many versions of that story that he had memorized the details. When they gave the same investigation to another investigative team who was familiar with the terror beat (with the benefit of hindsight), that team concluded that the story was a hoax.

It feels like the NYT is the USA equivalent of the BBC, where it has a big audience for the medium and on the surface seems like it should be trustworthy but often is a mouthpiece for those in power via insider sources ala Judith Miller for the NYT. Even that one writer Haberman who covers Trump often amplifies totally fictional favorable Trump stories on social media.

Lots of talk about NYT and bias but by far their biggest is their bias towards interventionalism. Any journalism project under their umbrella that nudges its readers/listeners in this direction is going to face the absolute bare minimum amount of scrutiny.

But their war reporting staff needs _something_ to do! /s

There's a lot of NYT and liberal fans that will defend the paper against any transgression, but I contend the NYT is not a newspaper, but an entertainment organization. They don't retract or change anything unless they absolutely have to, and probably in this case were forced to. There is no journalism anymore, it's all mass entertainment.

The NYT is compromising on comprehensive, un-opinionated, fact discovery, and is instead catering to an audience. The former makes a news org, and the latter (under the guise of reporting) makes for a tabloid. It's hard because there are some pieces that are unbiased and thorough, and NYT and their supporters can point to those in its defense. But a news org should be required to do that with almost 100% consistency. Anything less is an entertainment org that is taking advantage of being considered a news org.

What do you consider a real newspaper?

I would contend that there aren't really any at the moment. There's an opening for comprehensive fact-based reporting with a reputation for not taking a side.

How do the AP and Reuters differ from your description?

I think they're closer, but I believe they leave they're not completely comprehensive, meaning some things are under investigated.

Here's their Corrections section, there are multiple articles corrected daily: https://www.nytimes.com/section/corrections

As I remember the series, they presented pro and con arguments about believing him near the beginning, and never expressed certainty that it was true, but felt it was likely enough true that it was worth reporting.

Then when more facts came out, it was retracted.

This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do, rather than punishing them for not figuring it out in the first place. No one is perfect. They never will be. What we want is people who are willing to call themselves out on their own errors. Wanting people to never make them is impossible, and just encourages them to pretend they are perfect by never doubting themselves and never revealing the truth when it is eventually available.

[Edited for a missing period.]

100% agree. We are in this cultural state that it is better to dig in your heels on something wrong than to say, hey, I made a mistake. This is my new take based on new data.”

That's my biggest issue with stories like these.

Some news sources call out when they make mistakes and own up to them. And they get piled on for being wrong.

Other news sources (ahem...) say misleading stuff frequently and never correct it, never retract it and continue to mislead their audience.

This whole concept of pile one because someone admitted their wrong has to be the least healthy event I've ever seen. And yet instead of it going down as upholding editorial standards, it will be a case of "see they're wrong, don't trust them".

As an example, a significant portion of an American political party spent years believing (still believe last I checked) a former US president was born in Kenya.

Yes, it takes courage to admit you were wrong in front of a global audience. I blame them for not having the proper fact-checking procedures in place for the podcast, but I applaud them for owning this and for their apparent willingness to learn from this.

> As I remember the series, they presented pro and con arguments about believing him near the beginning, and never expressed certainty that it was true, but felt it was likely enough true that it was worth reporting.

I remember this, too, and it's the second part I take issue with. A judgment call of "likely enough true" when the reality is "entirely fictional" points, in my opinion, to either a lack of judgment, or a lack of journalistic ethics. As others have pointed out, very basic fact-checking was all that was needed to figure out this guy was a complete fraud.

We should not be praising the New York Times for letting its standards slip because the story was so cool, then eventually - years later! - realizing they'd let them slip a little too much and half-heartedly apologizing.

What’s your opinion on their incentives for letting that quality control slip? The need for sexy digital content to remain relevant? Cost-cutting to remain competitive? A change in identity from “news” to “entertainment”? Something else?

All of the above? Throw in corrupted management that doesn't realize you can't coast on an old reputation forever, and if you keep letting quality slide eventually there will be a watershed moment.

As an aside, I think you can see this happening in California right now. California (and more specifically SF) has been winning for so long that now public officials have drunk their own cool-aid and seem to think Cali/SF is some sort of magic place and it's all the things they've done which have made it tech mecca. Except probably it's not, and that will become obvious as everyone slowly wakes up to that.

The podcast was an experiment at the time, and the people making it were outside the structure in which the print journalists were operating. The story was sexy, guard rails were not entirely in place, and everyone was enthusiastic about making the podcast so they overlook details they shouldn't have. They touch upon this here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

A podcast has a written script just like a story in the paper. NYT has editors and fact checkers.

There's no excuse for this; the organization failed to justify its claim to be the "paper of record".

Yes, but from what I heard from my parents (who are ex-editor of major publications) there was a lot of skepticism from bureau chiefs on the war beat. The NYT is a diverse organization and there are factions.

Different department in the company; different procedures. The podcast was handled outside the standard hierarchy because they wanted to experiment and out of the turf wars.

I'm not saying that's how it should be, but apparently that's how it was.

I noticed a sort of almost prurient interest in salacious details about ISIS among liberals around the time the podcast came out, so I think that was part of it, they just knew something along these lines would be popular and sell. (Conservatives may have had much the same interest, I don't know, but if they did they weren't going to the NYT to get their fix.)

The "ISIS as unconscionable bogeyman" story also helped sell the U.S. intervention in Syria, which was an ongoing objective on the NYT's part.

NYT has been a war hawk for both D and R administration going back at least to 2000.

Well before 2000, since at least the Gulf War

Callimachi was an absolute rockstar at the paper. She had been nominated for multiple Pulitzer Prizes and this, amongst other things, would lead to another nom. I suspect there was a deference to a veteran reporter at the top of her game, a feeling of sunk cost and risk analysis that said "this is so good that we have to publish it".

I think it was a case of the NYT quite openly deluding themselves.

I don't think it needs that much explanation. The New York Times and other institutional press have often done this same thing. Which is, they report from "credible" sources without physical evidence of any kind. A source is considered credible by how much clout it carries with other major institutions or because of a history of trust. i.e. Even though intelligence and the military get things wrong all the time even to the point of outright lying, they are "credible".

This has lead them astray many times in much more significant matters. Once reported, they treat contrary evidence as innuendo in all but the most severe cases of contrary evidence. I think they only bothered with a significant retraction effort here because the evidence of their error was so compelling and public.

> A judgment call of "likely enough true" when the reality is "entirely fictional" points, in my opinion, to either a lack of judgment

Completely justified and reasonable judgement that something is "likely to be true" can be sometimes be incorrect because that's what the word "likely" means.

I disagree. "Likely" is a probability statement, not an escape valve. If I say "it is likely the sky will be purple tomorrow", and then it is not, I still must answer: Why did I think it was likely? That's a judgment call.

> "Likely" is a probability statement, not an escape valve.

This is a good warning that we ought to be more mindful of.

What was half hearted about the apology?

Callimachi's apology on Twitter[1] is itself okay, I think. It's the NYT article[2] that I read as weirdly congratulatory/"look how committed to journalism we are!" while discussing a fairly massive journalistic failure.

[1] https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1339956839082037250

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/business/media/new-york-t...

I would agree if it was a NYT column entirely about him, but this was a podcast talking about the ins and out of ISIS and exploring the process of investigation. I would argue that Chaudhry was just one part of the story, and his purpose was actually to show how hard it is to verify facts when it comes to ISIS.

> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors…

Absolutely — this is just basic "how humans work". Anyone complaining about this positive action (performed with the understanding of the PR cost) doesn't understand how to get what they purport to want in the world.

The Times isn't a child in need of operant conditioning; you've anthropomorphized a newspaper. But even if we admit the logical leap from an organization to the humans which collectively direct that organization, we must still contend with the fact that unqualified praise will be associated with the entire sequence of actions that led to it, rather than (perhaps) a single action that was only undertaken after making lots of unpraiseworthy actions.

I'm of the opinion that, when it comes to journalism, courage and integrity are table stakes. They need not be praised because they are expected, and their absence should be ruthlessly punished. Even with this premise, one can tolerate mistakes and errors without needing to praise non-mistakes and non-errors.

No, they shouldn't be praised for calling out their own errors--let alone be aligned with "courage"--just as one shouldn't praise an encyclopedia or scientific journal for correcting errors: it's supposed to be de facto matter of course.

The criticisms, however, are against their politically loaded decisions to run certain content in the absence of legitimate sources of truth. If this were an occasional thing, sure, accidents happen. But this has become the modus operandi of what once was the paper of record.

Between the absolute backpedaling of the 1619 Project, copious amounts of Russian influence narrative, and countless "anonymous sources" that turn out to be nobodies or absent integrity, the NYT is an embarrassment to journalism.

They do what you described, though: they build in back doors into their reporting so they can legitimately claim that they weren't "wrong" on a purely logical--but functionally bullsh*t--standing.

No, I don't believe they deserve "praise" for "courage and integrity", because they've left those--and other markers of high character--in the past as they cry their death throes in the changing media landscape.

The problem with Fauci saying we shouldn't wear masks is that there was not some initial data which indicated that this was the right choice, it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement).

Saying nothing when you have no data is fine, asserting / prescribing something ("you don't need to wear masks") when you have no data is not. Err on the side of caution, hedge against risk. This is basic stuff and top public health officials need to be held to a (much) better standard.

^- this +1

That isn't at all true. If you took 5 minutes to actually read the detailed rationale published by CDC, you would see why they opposed masks.

People tend to use mask wearing as a replacement for social distancing. They aren't. They are a risk mitigation method for cases where social distance is unavoidable. CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket. They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.

What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?

Stating your rationale doesn't mean your rationale is backed up with evidence.

Again, top public health officials need to be held to a higher standard. That means understanding how populations behave, not just understanding the medicine. That means consistent messaging. The message throughout should've been:

> This is a dangerous virus, and the best way not to get it is to avoid contact with any other people at all. However, if you absolutely need to come into contact with other individuals, risk can be reduced if everyone is wearing a mask. Masks are not anywhere near 100% effective, but they do help, which is why you should be avoiding human contact and only be going out with a mask if absolutely necessary.

> What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?

Maybe all of the other examples of Americans coming together against a common threat from the last couple of centuries?

The messaging wasn't consistent. The POTUS ranted and raved on Twitter ad nausium about how its all a hoax.

Like the 3 waves of the Spanish Flu?

In the early months of the outbreak there was almost no evidence, and yet we reasonably expected the experts to give their best shot at an answer. They looked at the probabilities as best they could estimate them from the characteristics of similar diseases, that's all the evidence they had at the time, and updated their guidance as they got more data.

The problem has always been that this disease is very unusual in many different ways. This has quite understandably caused many best efforts at estimating it's behaviour to turn out to be wrong.

It's really not enough though. Populations (and arguably esp. the American population) are not automatons that you can just direct and they will follow orders when you first tell them to go left and then soon after tell "oops, actually you should've gone right".

Messaging needs to be consistent and err on the side of caution... this was the exact opposite of both of those things.

SARS-CoV-2 is actually not that unusual – the mRNA COVID vaccines that have been developed are based on the spike protein that is common to all "coronaviruses" (hence the name) and was previously isolated from SARS-CoV-1 (i.e. SARS). At the very least we knew it was a coronavirus early on, so there is no reason you wouldn't assume it was respiratory in nature, just like SARS was.

We knew it was respiratory right from the start, but that doesn’t mean the virus load on small droplets is enough to cause transmission. There’s an awful lot more to it than that. As for credibility, suppose they had recommended everyone wear masks and it turned out to have no appreciable effect. What consequences would that have had, especially amongst those claiming the whole thing was a scare?

Honesty is always the best policy?

> This is a coronavirus, just as SARS was before it. This one seems both more lethal and more contagious than SARS, so we are recommending everyone wears a face-mask (even one you've made yourself) when you go to any public place until we understand more about the virus.

etc. etc. etc.

Not "no need to wear a face mask".

Is slicing the context off his statements honest? Fauci did not just say there was no need. He was very specific and clear that he didn't have enough evidence to recommend it.

Again, a competent public health official would err on the side of caution while simultaneously being honest about it.

No, masks were mandated for health personnel dealing with COVID from day one. It was simply a lot of bad faith/ascientific messaging by WHO and national authorities early on.

This also to a large extent fuelled the anti-makser movement you have trouble reigning in now. Absolutely moronic.

The anti-masker movement would have happened anyway. There's no logical consistency there which is very apparent when you listen to their "arguments".

It would have certainly happened. It could also never have reached such a magnitude had health authorities not proclaimed for 3 months that masks are the new facehuggers.

Yes, except Fauci was against masks because of fake science, I mean because of supply. I.e He lied. (And has admitted it was because of supply).

https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

And most anti-maskers are against it because of government overreach. Unrelated to science.

A third party has emerged. The "we'll believe and parrot anything because it's what we're told".

They act in the following realm (whether they are aware or not): Cotton/cloth masks don't work. But it qualifies as a mask so checkbox! Moral superiority is on my side whether science is or not doesn't matter.

PPE was recommended for people dealing with Covid positive.

Fauci lied (and admitted to it) that masks weren't effective and suggested that the average person should not wear them.

To be fair, I heard the whole medical community here (I'm in one of the largest medical centers in the world) laugh and scoff at normal people wearing masks (because they weren't trained and it isn't effective).

And now we have no N95 for the general public and idiotic cloth masks (that don't work).

So it turns out they weren't far off I their scoffing... But for the wrong reasons.

Now we see them (and other anto-science) normals flip and ignore the data on bad masks. "Something is better than nothing". False sense of security and just more lies and moral superiority.

This was what they said!

Do you not remember the March lockdowns?

Everyone was saying that except Trump and the people in the Administration whose mouths he taped shut, next thought he'd look bad if a pandemic existed so he said things like "there's a dozen cases now, they'll be none soon; this will be over by Easter". Then when he was briefly reined in, we had a belated national effort to lockdown with "30 days to stop the spread".

>CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket.

At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing". For better or worse, most Americans probably aren't going to search out CDC publications as their primary source for detailed information.

He has indicated PPE was part of the rationale:

"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs,"

To be fair, he's been in a very difficult situation and I can only imagine the number of verbal miscues I would have made if placed in a similar scenario.

>At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing".

CDC isn't to blame for this. At this point there was a TON of political interference and bureaucratic restrictions on what they were allowed to say, and they were reined in very early. There were lots of entire careers and stuff some people call "my life's work" held in the lurch there.

A very good point. It was what I was dancing around in my statement about Fauci being in a difficult situation.

I may be being too critical, but I think certain professions of public trust need to be held to higher standards in this regard. Meaning, while I can commiserate with the idea that careers hang in the balance, they owe it to the public to be honest. It's why certain roles are "professions" and not "jobs" (there is generally a professed oath to serve the public good). This is where I would hold them deficient in their communication and, unfortunately, a threat to a career isn't sufficient to avoid one's professed ethics. Misspeaking is one thing, misleading is another.

How many public appearances has Dr. Fauci made since January? So much shade being thrown in this thread for a few missteps during a complicated situation. Meanwhile the President of the United States, with access to the world’s best intelligence and expert recommendations on the subject, denied the severity of the pandemic for months after it became an international crisis. He did it for his own perceived political benefit.

I've tried to give the benefit of the doubt in my higher comments about how difficult the situation was/is.

What I don't think is excusable is lying to the public as a public health official. The PPE part seems to show "We can't trust the public, so we should lie to them." It's an ends-justify-the-means position, which is a dangerous mindset in someone who influences public policy.

If it were just "a few missteps" that's one thing. Making the wrong call under uncertainty in a dynamically changing situation is excusable. Having the (lack of) ethics to think the appropriate response is to lie to the public is much less so.

> I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs

I don't trust Fauci because of this. He lied, he doesn't see it that way, he he doesn't seem to acknowledge how it undermined trust.

I also don't like his approach. It's very preachy. That's not what we need right now. We need someone saying "please stay home, but we know some of you are going to see loved ones for the holidays, so we added testing capacity and locations so it's super easy to get tested."

We can’t just spin up testing capability, though. Normalizing violations of social distancing, then claiming that we will have a safety net for all the people who will hear that and think “oh, staying home? That’s for other people to do” when we can’t actually support everyone doing that is not helpful at all.

> We can’t just spin up testing capability, though.

Back in March and April, I'd agree. It's December now, so there's no excuses for this. There's also no excuses for the problems with the vaccine rollout.

Fauci would LOVE to add testing capacity. You're blaming Fauci for Team Trump's self-serving undermining of Fauci's work.

We have immense testing capacity in the U.S. where's the lack?

Try to book one in the coming pre-Christmas week or look at lines for drive-thru testing.

I can get a test at about 50 locations within 20 miles of me on Monday. Just checked.

I have not looked at the lines you are talking of recently but I've never seen people unserved.

We have plenty of testing capacity and we are doing a LOT of testing.

Maybe it's better now. At least before Thanksgiving, it was bad:

https://abc7.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-dodger-stadium-ap...

Just went past drive through free testing today and baseball field. Was busy. But everyone getting served.

Please tell me you've seen this yourself and not just read nonsense news about it.

Getting tested prior to gatherings isn't enough to stop the spread.

You need tests and periods of isolation, with the periods of isolation being the more important component (that many people don't have much ability to choose right now).

What happens a lot is that people get tested, think they are safe, then after becoming infectious spend a bunch of time with people.

So advertising expanded testing isn't really a viable public health message.

I need to see a citation for that. My gut tells be that if people had mostly accurate at-home tests they took ~daily, it would actually reduce spread massively, especially when it can be asymptomatic.

I'm sure that would have impact, but it isn't what you described above, you described advertising more locations and capacity to make people feel better about visits and gatherings.

I also expect that compliance wouldn't be all that high for at home testing (people skipping tests, deciding they still feel good enough, etc). It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to establish that access for people that would use it well though.

Also, there's a difference between working to increase testing so that more people do get tested before a holiday and making that the center of your message. They need to be careful to not mislead or give the impression that they are misleading, but they could limit the messaging to a statement about working to expand testing.

The real solution would have been to tell people to wear masks and invoke the Defense Production Act with 3M and other manufacturers so that medical-grade masks were directed to the right place. People were screaming at the administration to do this at the time (Jan/Feb).

> They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.

Do you have citations for any of this stuff? Because I have seen places where Fauci and the CDC admitted that their main reason for discouraging masks was to prevent a run on PPE, and I've never seen one where they have explained that it was part of some broader strategy like this. In fact, my memory of the time where they were advising against masks is that social distancing was much less emphasized in the public health messaging than hand washing and avoiding face touching.

Western governments recommending against masks is one of the biggest government fuck-ups I've ever witnessed and now there's no lack of people trying to cover it up and find excuses for it.

The quote below is from "Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population". There's enough studies looking at this for SARS and influenza- including for the general population - that it is highly irresponsible to err on the side of not using masks even if there's no clear evidence for population usage for SARS-2.

"Opportunistic data collected during the SARS epidemic in Asia suggested that population-wide use of face masks may significantly decrease transmission of not only SARS but also influenza [3,4,5,6,7]. As part of pandemic preparedness, many are contemplating the contribution wide-spread use of masks could have [8,9]."

3. Lau JTF, Tsui H, Lau M, Yang X (2004) SARS transmission, risk factors and prevention in Hong Kong. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 587–92.

4. Lo JYC, Tsang THF, Leung Y, Yeung EYH, Wu T, et al. (2005) Respiratory infections during SARS outbreak, Hong Kong, 2003. Emerging Infectious Diseases 15: 1738–41.

5. Wilder-Smith A, Low JGH (2005) Risk of respiratory infections in health care workers: lesson on infection control emerge from the SARS outbreak. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 36: 481–488.

6. Wu J, Xu F, Zhou W, Feikin DR, Lin C-Y, et al. (2004) Risk factors for SARS among persons without known contact with SARS patients, Beijing, China. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 210–16.

7. Tang CS, Wong CY (2004) Factors influencing the wearing of facemasks to prevent the severe acute respiratory syndrome among adult Chinese in Hong Kong. Preventive Medicine 39: 1187–93.

8. World Health Organisation Writing Group (2006) Nonpharmaceutical Inter- ventions for Pandemic Influenza, International Measures. Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 81–87.

9. World Health Organisation Writing Group (2006) Non-pharmaceutical Interventions for Pandemic Influenza, National and Community Measures. Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 88–94.

It's absolutely insane (or a transparent deception) to make the argument that CDC in March saying "don't wear masks" is the problem here for eroding trust, when the right political wing was opposed to scientific voices even before that, and 9 months later so many people are opposing mask wearing now? How can one say out of one side of their mouth that the CDC was wrong then, and out the other side day that the CDC advice is wrong now? If CDC was wrong about masks in March, why are people who say that still opposed to wearing masks?

It's insane to hold the people who claim to be scientists to a higher standard than the people who don't?

With regards to our lovely two-party system, both sides (yes I know) typically only cite "science" when it suits them. In the defense of "the left" (sorry I hate talking about politics as if it's one-dimensional), it does seem like data supports their policies more often than it does the right, but again, a false dichotomy is the wrong way of looking at this.

Remove politics from the discussion and science is still facing a crisis: reproducibility crisis, proposing unfalsifiable theories, spending more time worrying about positive results than finding the truth, politics influencing science (not just the other way around as it should be), the profit-driven concerns of higher learning institutions, etc, etc.

The CDC is not the man on the street. The man on the street can distrust an institution that suggests something unscientific when they are requesting trust from the public.

Doesn't matter if said man on the street thinks the earth is flat, has a mental disorder or likes tennis more than soccer.

An institution should not be judged on the merits of the people judging them.

Also, people not wanting the government to force them what to do with their bodies is not quite the same as them not believing that there is a health risk when not wearing masks. Stop conflating the two. Engage the argument instead of the strawmen (or don't, but be honest about it.)

US politics are irrelevant. As I've said, this was happening universally outside of Asia.

Most of the people in the USA denying mask use are right wingers who choose to listen to politicians rather than scientists, that's the 90% problem, not what you're pointing out. Their leaders tell them masks don't work and they listen. Others listened to scientists and we're better for it but if half the country is ignoring it, it greatly reduces the effectiveness of masks. The CDC backtracked within a month or two that masks could be a good idea even homemade ones to limit the aerosols. To say anything else is nitpicking, we've have 6 months and people still deny it. Nothing you pointed out would have changed it since Trump double downed on not wearing a mask and his luddites followed behind him.

I don't think that's a reasonable expectation of someone in Fauci's position. Wearing a mask or not is a binary decision, when people ask if they should wear masks of someone in that role they reasonably expect a binary answer of what they should do and at any given time he took his best shot at answering that question.

What he said in March was that he didn't believe there was any reason for most fo the public to wear a mask, that's because he didn't have any evidence that it was effective at that time. Evidence is a reason, absence of evidence is not a reason for action. This is very simple. I happen to have thought even at the time that we should be wearing masks, but that was just an opinion and at that time the opposite opinion was also reasonable. We were still working things out.

Accusing him of lying in service of some conspiracy theory really is going too far.

He literally said in a later interview that he lied. It doesn’t require a conspiracy for someone to lie. People sometimes just lie.

We knew all along how viral respiratory diseases including corona viruses are transmitted, and that masks have some effectiveness in preventing spread for such viruses. In the absence of direct evidence one way or another for masking effectiveness COVID itself, the reasonable assumption would have been that masks are indeed effective until proven otherwise.

This reasoning is nonsense. The early days of the pandemic aren't going to have a high-N RCT, so reasoning from higher-uncertainty sources of knowledge is important. An obvious prior for a fucking _respiratory_ disease is that masks reduce population spread, and the no-cost recommendation to wear masks in the early pandemic is one of the few policy levers that would have actually saved lives.

Substitute "crystal healing", or "hydroxychloroquin" for "population-wide mask usage to contain a viral disease". To the medical sciences, these three are (were) more alike than they are different: they all are interventions that may or may not achieve a desired outcome, and may or may not have some unwanted side effects.

In January/February 2020, there was about as much evidence for either of those propositions. The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting. Existing studies of their use as practiced in parts of Asia were inconclusive.

Yes, I know: Masks seem like a really good idea. The whole concept makes sense. There's a theory as to how they work.

But medicine stopped believing any theory as to what may or may not be useful around a hundred years ago, after killing countless people with bloodletting, mercury, vapour-vaping, whatever... All those interventions may seem ridiculous to you, but they all followed some entirely believable logic that accounted for all the known facts as long as one did not actually run a double-blind trial.

It's instructive to look at the fate of two of those interventions: masks and that quinine. We now know the former works and the latter does not. And I'll be immodest and mention that I considered masks to be effective from day one, while spending only about a week drinking Gin Tonics for health reasons, until the full extend of the seediness of that French doctor pushing it became public (and I had to go back to a different set of reasons for the drinks).

But at about the same time along each treatment's timeline, there really was more actual, or at least claimed to be factual, evidence for the Malaria-malarky than there was for masks. And while I'm supremely excellent at predictioneering, I utterly fail when trying to distill some set of specific rules to follow.

Maybe there's wisdom in numbers? Do a survey in the US right now, and you'll probably get 55 % to advocate for masks, 42 % believing in the insect-repellant. And that's about four months after the science on those questions has been settled.

Actually, there's no reasonable pathway for crystal healing to help here. On the other hand, it's entirely plausible and there's real-world experience to support (1) masks filtering harmful particles and (2) hydroxychloroquin being useful against an immune system run amuck, which is the way 'flu' often injures patients. So, no, only two of the three were similar.

Zero credit to those who would equate all three or who would dismiss either of the latter two without diligent, unbiased investigation and solid empirical evidence.

Yes, I don't disagree. I chose crystal healing because it's silly. I supported masks because it seems to make sense.

But none of that is evidence in the double-blind trials sense of the word. And you're actually making my case: there was a plausible mechanism for hydroxychloroquine, as well as for masks. But only one of them works, while the other probably killed a few people, and wasted a whole lot of time.

HCQ is a very safe medicine.

That's neither particularly true not in connected to the argument.

Quote from above:

Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business.

It is particularly true. And too many armchair academics are painting HCQ in a bad light when it is an immensely important and safe drug.

> Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business.

I'm not arguing with this. Who cares.

Doctors still recommend it, it still works and doctors still use it themselves.

Nope, but for masks, overwhelming evidence exists prior to 2020.

Just because you don't understand how this virus spreads does not mean that we need a new trial before we can make a recommendation.

Link to a study?

This reasoning is implicit in the apologists for our early pandemic public health incompetence, but it's incredible to see it concretely articulated.

How do you add absence of high-quality, narrow evidence for effectiveness + strong prior for effectiveness + ~zero-cost intervention and land at "don't recommend cloth face covering"?

All the other examples you gave fail one of these criteria: there's no prior suggesting that Crystal healing is valuable, HCQ has side effects and presents costs/supply chain challenges that _cloth_ doesn't, etc.

An example from the other side is vitamin D: there's been enough weak evidence that anyone scientifically literate has been keeping an eye on their vitamin D since the early pandemic, given that: there's moderate evidence it's protective + there's a high chance you're deficient anyway + D toxicity is pretty hard to achieve.

One side effect that was mentioned at the time was people engaging in risky behaviour thinking they'll be protected by the mask.

Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business. They neither recommended masks nor warned against them, but laid out the facts: "we don't (didn't) know. We're scrambling to get data. We'll let you know"

I'm honestly baffled that the concept of a trial is so alien to people, and that nobody seems to be capable of the tiny transference of recognising that masks are no different than a pill. I could come up with a possible reason Aspirin might work: maybe it's the fever that kills, Aspirin lowers it. The risk is known and rather small. Should medical science recommend everyone to take Aspirin? Does it seem entirely implausible that a significant number of people would say/think "It's not the best time for a wedding, but everyone has taken triple doses of Aspirin so it should be fine"

Masks and the way this virus spreads isn't new.

New medicines, requiring trials are novel.

Golden eggs and apples shouldn't be compared.

What new data has finally come in that has shown that masks do not slow the spread or that they do? And new we have guidance?

The problem here is that the medical community, when they have skin in the game wear and recommended masks, from day 1.

Again, the virus is novel, how it spreads is not.

I answered this far above:

The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting

Go find a study showing the effectiveness of masks for prevention of infection in the general population published before 2020.

Moving the goalposts. I didn't say general population, I said masks. Efficacy will be tested where it can be observed. I.e. very unlikely that a trial with high confidence will ever work on the public.

Also, given your arguments, what is your position on the efficacy of lockdowns vs. their negative effects?

> Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business. They neither recommended masks nor warned against them, but laid out the facts: "we don't (didn't) know. We're scrambling to get data. We'll let you know"

This is false.

> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm

--@Surgeon_General

https://mobile.twitter.com/surgeon_general/status/1233725785...

I think your analogy perfectly captures why we must criticize it.

Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them.

The media then lambasts anyone who uses this to sow scepticism about these institutions, calling them conspiracy theorists instead.(which is true for certain cohorts, but wielded as a blanket statement)

My trust in various academic institutions has gone down by orders of magnitude since the UCL/NE Journal and many of the other covid fiascos. The statistical and scientific rigor employed by experts and epidemiologist seems to be massively lacking.

Similarly, a series of missteps by the NYT has led me to (a much larger degree than the previous analogy) lose trust in its reporting. Sadly, there do not seem to be any alternative sources outside of either reading the papers directly or finding specific individuals I place high amount of trust in.

Both are all too time consuming for someone with a full time job.

This isn’t accurate.

The reason Fauci (and others) said not to wear masks early on is because there was a shortage and they wanted to be sure medical professionals could have access to masks.

Medical professionals have known for a century that masks help prevent the spread of disease - particularly an airborne or aerosolized.

Yes,they misled. Even a scarf over the face would have helped.

Fauci should be tried at Hague.

No, scarfs don't work.

Literally anything works to an extent.

If the virus is in microdroplets in your breath, something in front of your face when you breathe out is going to slow some of those droplets down, making them less likely to be inhaled by others nearby. This is just physics. If it can fog your glasses its helping. If it makes you smell your own breath its helping.

A scarf is better than nothing, just like a homemade mask is better than a scarf, just like a purpose built mask is better than a homemade one.

Mitigating risk by using methods approaching zero efficacy is useless.

"This is just physics".

No this is just your intuition. Scarfs don't protect you or others. Neither do gaiters. This has been tested. They may work mildly for UV protection... But there you can be fooled as well.

They just don't work. N95s provide a level of protection but they are not full proof. The further away you move from N95 the more useless they get. Cotton etc. don't protect. They are overcome by physics.

Other countries told everyone to wear pieces of cloth around their face in the early days of the pandemic hitting their country. There was no cloth shortage, and this was a basic precaution that could (and should) have been taken without badly affecting the supply of respirators for medical personnel. This is to say nothing of the lies[1] told in service of this policy: principally that masks aren't effective for controlling spread among the general public when there was no contrary evidence and the prudent prior would've been to use masks (for a fucking respiratory disease!) until proven ineffective.

Policymaking and public health guidance is complex. There are details of the population's behavior that can't be fully controlled, but can be influenced, and maintaining credibility is crucially important here. Burning public trust with lies (or worse, basic inability to think critically under conditions of uncertainty) early on in the pandemic was a lot more damaging than the incidental effect of a cloth-mask recommendation on early N95 supply would have been.

[1] Worse than and more plausible than lies is simply incompetence. The medical industry is famously bad at critical thinking: I've known people who came out of (top-ranked) med school _less_ able to reason under uncertainty and deal with statistics, because of the culture of oversimplification they're indoctrinated with. I have no opinion on whether this is wise for the field overall, but it's an especially poor fit for a fast-moving, low-information environment like the early days of a pandemic.

If this was a valid reason for lying, or misleading the public, why wouldn't they continue doing it with the vaccine? Why not have Fauci say, "no, the vaccine is ineffective" or "people don't need a vaccine" right now, when the vaccine is in short supply, in order to ensure all medical professionals have access to the vaccine without additional demand from the public?

> it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement)

Do you have have any evidence of this?

Fauci was obviously lying. Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions. There is lots of public research confirming this. Here are a couple examples:

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ - this is a paper from 2013 testing the efficacy of homemade masks versus surgical masks finding that both have some effect but surgical masks are better. If you look under "similar articles" you'll find 4 there about masks reducing the spread of airborne viruses from before 2020.

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ - demonstrates 2010 study showing the strong effect of N95s against small particles in the breath (on which the virus is borne) and comparing it to homemade masks. Concludes homemade masks would offer marginal protection. Again, in similar articles you'll see another three from before 2020 on the efficacy of masks.

Masks were well and widely known to be useful at slowing the spread of airborne contagions - especially N95 masks. People knew homemade masks had some effect too.

There was probably good reason to want to save N95's for medical professionals. There was no reason to say masks weren't helpful for the general public though, that was an absolute lie. Fauci and others had all the information they needed at the start of the pandemic and could have said "Masks are useful, that's why we need the best masks for our medical workers. We've put together information on how you can make homemade masks that are X% effective and what you can buy and use."

> Fauci was obviously lying.

That's not evidence, but a claim that you provide no evidence for. Even if he was wrong, you don't have evidence that he made a mistake or that he lied.

> Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions.

IIRC, most medical experts agreed with Fauci at the time. The analysis of someone on the Internet doesn't mean much.

Here: https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

I am appalled that he lied and owned up to it later.

But from his perspective (and it may have been not just his choice) what were the alternatives if his goal was to preserve frontline medical workers? (Regardless if this policy actually saved anyone).

I can see why it was done and at the same time feel lied to and that that is wrong.

I don't think he "lied", he just weighed the pros and cons and gave an advice, which may not have been the best. Later as the pros and cons changed, he updated his advice. Did he even claim that "masks don't help stop the virus"? That would've been a lie but I don't think he said anything like that.

https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

Discussion: https://youtu.be/_2MmX2U2V3c

He did lie. He gave advice with ulterior motives.

You can call it "ulterior motives", I called it "weighing the pros and cons". While the host in your video claims "he lied to us", again he only said "you don't need to wear masks for now", he never claimed they don't work or that they wouldn't help, just that you don't need them yet.

His reason for recommending not wearing masks was "to save PPE capacity for frontline medical workers". Not any of reasons he gave at the time.

This is a definition of ulterior motive.

I'm not making a judgement whether he was right/wrong by giving that advice (which the WHO did as well for the same reasons). Just pointing out that he did lie.

I personally don't like being lied to by people that represent a lot of power (doesn't matter what they're motives are. Lying is used to deceive for ulterior motives). That is just an indicator that I can't trust public facing scientists because the truth is not a priority, rather only the outcome that they desire (whether personally or as a group.) But that's not new.

You should take a second to read the essay "On Bullshit." What he said there was bullshit, written to cause an outcome, not to tell the truth.

Integrity starts by verifying your sources before publishing things as facts to millions of listeners.

> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

This is technically true, but doesn't convey well that it was quite clear that N95 masks worked well, and he suggested they didn't work because they were in short supply and he wanted to preserve the ability of medical personnel to use them, not because there wasn't data that they worked. The data that came in were about cloth masks also being largely effective, thereby alleviating worries about a lasting shortage. Before that became apparent, Fauci was forced to choose between an immediate shortage of masks for hospital workers, and long-term credibility if such a situation arises again.

If that’s the case, I think he miscalculated. The damage from losing trust in the government has the potential for causing more damage than a temporary shortage of N95 masks

It IS the case, and to be clear, it wasn’t just Fauci. It was the entire government and CDC.

Because, for some reason, the US didn’t take the threat of COVID seriously until three months after it was discovered.

CDC is respected worldwide. Their recommendations had far reaching effect.

"This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in."

Only that's not what happened. This is a bad analogy, or a good one depending on how you view the overt false narrative-creation of much of today's media. Fauci didn't "change his mind" with more evidence. He readily admits to overtly lying because he made a determination that some lives were more valuable than others. That. Is. Frightening.

This isn't intended to be a political statement, simply a fact that you are memory-holing.

Some people here are saying they shouldn't be praised for the retraction because retracting an error is merely doing what a publication should do. This is wrongheaded, because it ignores the fact that in the actual world in which we actually live, rather than a fantasy world that we would all like to live in, it's a rarity. We need much more of it than we have. Punishing the Times at the moment they do good by issuing a retraction will just encourage more publications to be in the camp that do not admit error. The cost of admitting error will be seen as too high.

That isn't to say that the Times shouldn't be held to account when errors are found by others. It should, and so should every other publication. But when they find and retract their own errors, it is absolutely wrong to punish them at that moment.

> Some people here are saying they shouldn't be praised for the retraction because retracting an error is merely doing what a publication should do.

We should be praising five-year-olds for brushing their teeth, but from adults we expect it by default. And while NYT went down in quality in the last few years, let’s not treat it as if it is a five-year-old.

They are still better than most of their competition, even the non-lunatic ones like Bloomberg or Forbes. We should praise the system when it works, when you have a systemic failure it's too late.

> That isn't to say that the Times shouldn't be held to account when errors are found by others. It should

But that's exactly what happened here. It wasn't the NYT who found the errors, unless I misread TFA.

So, in your "not to say"... That's exactly what you seem to be saying.

> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

Fauci has said that he deliberately lied to people because he was afraid masks would be in short supply.

Show me where he's admitted to "deliberately lying". In every interview I've seen he's said the opposite, e.g. [1]

> "I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm's way every day to take care of sick people," Fauci told O'Donnell.

> "When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks," he said.

> "And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores," Fauci added. "So in the context of when we were not strongly recommending it, it was the correct thing."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...

I think this may be the interview where people in the "he lied" camp may be referencing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w

“…when people were saying you don’t really need to wear a mask well the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community and many people were saying this were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment including the N95 masks and the surgical masks were in very short supply and we wanted to make sure that the people namely the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm ways to take care of people who you know are infected with the corona virus and the danger of them getting infected we did not want them to be without the equipment that they needed so there was not enthusiasm about going out and everybody buying a mask or getting a mask we were afraid that that would deter away and the people who really needed it”

This explains it clearly: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trum...

It's frankly worse because he won't even admit he was lying. We knew about asymptomatic spread back in January and he's mischaracterizing his own "masks don't work" message. It just further erodes any reason to trust him.

"Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks"

"There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face." - Dr Fauci, March 8th 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

>It's frankly worse because he won't even admit he was lying

Ah, the old classic. Should we start by cutting off a pinky? Or maybe bamboo splinters, for an international flavor?

He has been clear that he was speaking before transmissibility was known. First there was "no reason," then there was a reason. It's not hard, if you're not trying to intentionally misrepresent his words for some reason.

Sure, he says he was correct in not recommending them. Was he correct when he said that masks aren’t effective?

Fauci said plainly in an interview that he lied about masks, in an attempt to save them for front line workers, so that’s a questionable analogy.

Bad analogy. From all indications, Fauci said what he said in good faith whereas Callimachi seems to have been desperate to confirm that her source was credible in the face of a preponderance of evidence that he was not [1]:

> The assignment, Mr. Flood recalled thinking, was both hopeless and quite strange in its specificity [...] Ms. Callimachi was singularly focused. “She only wanted things that very narrowly supported this kid in Canada’s wild stories,” he told me in a phone interview.

> Mr. Flood didn’t know it at the time, but he was part of a frantic effort at The New York Times to salvage the high-profile project the paper had just announced.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/business/media/new-york-t...

The story (by a fellow Times writer) you linked is not only fascinating but provides a lot of context for Callimachi's investigation.

I think it does lend some credence to the claims that she was a reporter trying to massage the facts to fit a preconceived narrative.

>Wanting people to never make [errors] is impossible, and just encourages them to pretend they are perfect by never doubting themselves and never revealing the truth when it is eventually available.

This isn't specific to this story, but it is truly bizarre that changing your opinions or beliefs based on new information is viewed as a negative trait by modern American society, especially in politics.

> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for alling out their own errors

Hilarious. I predicted "we should be praising them for 'admitting' their mistakes" was going to be the top comment. And here we are.

I bet you don't feel the same way about fox news or alex jones.

> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

It wasn't more data. It was politic pressure.

> Wanting people to never make them is impossible

Stop building up a straw man. Nobody is criticizing the NYTimes for not being perfect. People criticize NYTimes for being state propaganda. You know they spread pro-war propaganda and then "oops, we were wrong". Now praise us for admitting we were wrong bullshit. "Oops, our intentional lies/propaganda led to millions of dead men, women and children. But at least we are man enough to admit it" schtick that the dumb masses love.

> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do, rather than punishing them for not figuring it out in the first place.

I mostly agree, since I think the heart of your statement here is the times admitted they made a mistake, and that is good behavior. That's dead on.

I disagree a little bit, because I don't think they should be praised for acknowledging their mistake and correcting it: I think that's the minimum expectation we should have for journalists. I agree that it's a sign of integrity (professional integrity, specifically) to own your errors, but I don't think it's particularly courageous to do it; more that the opposite would be cowardly.

>This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

Dr. Fauci works for a public health organization and nytimes is a for profit exchange listed company. So this comparison not fair.

The way I remember the mask debate is in March 2020 there was a shortage of PPE and health workers were in great need of masks. To avoid a mad rush of people hoarding masks just like they hoarded toilet paper, the Coronavirus Task Force was emphasising social distancing, hand washing more than wearing masks.

Now, the Caliphate story was outed as a lie by Canadian authorities. The nytimes did not verify their sources, they were caught lying which is why they had to retract their story.

This is a big difference.

Do imagine number of deaths Fauci caused. We wouldn't have been in this situation with promotion of masks. Even a cloth over the face helps.

Oh come on. You can't just hide behind "narrative tension" and problematizing the story when you're putting out false information that should have been fact checked more aggressively.

When it first began to come to light that the subject was likely lying, the creator of the podcast actually said that he was likely telling the truth and it was instead the Canadian police that were incompetent because they couldn't "prove he'd gone to Syria" [0].

They were pretty clear they thought it was a true story. I don't think adding some mild disclaimers once it starts coming to light that the story is not true abdicates them from responsibility for what they put out there.

Even at the time, NYT bureau chiefs (ie. experienced war reporters) were uneasy about the nature of the podcast. Absolutely the Times should be praised for calling out their own errors, but it is definitely embarrassing and (in my opinion) should be career-ending or damaging for the architect of the podcast. She wanted it to be true, so she didn't dig.

[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032

> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

Those aren't similar situations at all.

Fauci's comments are based on the data that's available at a particular time, about an ongoing, evolving situation, so it makes sense that his advice will change as the situation evolves.

On the other hand, this news story was was about a series of events that already happened and were no longer on going. All of the facts were out there but the journalists just didn't do their research.

So it's great that they're retracting the story, but they never should have published it in the first place.

100% agree.

Wont stop the bad faith actors who love to erode trust in reliable media so their own (flawed and dubious) views become more credible by comparison.

We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do

It's always fun to watch the tech bubble jump ugly on traditional media when it falters. Meanwhile, the front page of HN is full of Microsoft getting hacked by the Russians and Facebook pretending it exists to benefit society and democracy.

We can do both, praise and criticize. While I agree with your statements, they NYT also have another job: Report the news accurately. That's why they exist and it's critical to our society.

We shouldn't overreact to one error and I think the NY Times is generally more reliable than most. A metric for overall reliability would be very valuable, especially in the disinformation age. That would be an interesting project for a leading journalism school. But how to measure it? Omissions, including context, are just as significant inaccuracies as misstatements (imagine the story 'The U.S. declares war on Japan!' without context). How could the study objectively set a standard for what facts and context should be included?

> likely enough true

Is this the standard we want for journalism though? There is so much that goes on in the world that doesn't get reported in the NYT which is backed by concrete evidence why do we need a speculative journalism?

>This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

From what I understand he intentionally lied to the public because he wanted front line workers to get them first. This was doing the toilet paper panic. I believe he expressed this himself in an interview.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

"He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE."

Good on NYT for coming clean, but this is precisely why I don't trust institutions to vet their own product. "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is a mission statement for pathological organizations to get away with gambling on the market and socializing their failures.

Ombudsmen are typically hired for this reason.

My only experience with ombudsmen is ignored emails until top stakeholders face the pain, then immediate action to resolve their and only their issues.

Of course, the NYT got rid of their public editor--i.e. their ombudsman. But I disagree a bit, an ombudsman is more reactive; it's not reasonable for them to vet every story before it's printed. That's the job of the editors and their editors.

This seems a pretty major failing. Of course, they always seem that way after the fact. And TBH a lot of stories run that can't be verified beyond the tiniest shade of a doubt that are substantially accurate.

They came clean too late for any congratulations.

Good on NYT for coming clean

They didn't come clean, it's clear from the article they were busted.

They strongly resisted multiple challenges to the obvious problems with his accounts by other writers and organisations culminating in him being arrested for fraud.

Even if you are busted not all 'news' orgs would come clean, admitting the mistake and detailing out what went wrong.

https://www.npr.org/2017/09/15/551163406/fox-news-has-yet-to...

> Good on NYT for coming clean

They got caught - they didn't come clean.

And now they're trying to milk the fact that they were caught to make themselves sound humble.

I'm sorry but this is such an unfair take. If they were posting corrections like this daily or weekly, then you could argue for EAFP. But your comment implies that they do zero vetting and just publish whatever they want. It completely misses the nuance that "getting permission" isn't a black and white issue. It's a spectrum and you're rarely ever at 100%. You sometimes gotta make the call to publish a story at 95% or so, and in rare occasions it just turns out to not go your way.

You're implying that they should never post a story unless they are 100% certain, which means most stories would never get published, defeating the entire point of journalism. Obviously the threshold needs to be high, you don't want to post every single rumor, but just because they have 1 or 2 correction a year does not mean "they'd rather ask for forgiveness than get permission".

This is so disappointing. I really enjoyed Caliphate; it was fascinating, and I trusted the NYT to be able to vet its claims. Now I know I enjoyed a piece of nearly-fiction, and I feel cheated, because I still want to know about the subject matter.

I'm not sure retracting a years-old podcast is going to be enough to rebuild trust. I need to hear how the NYT is going to engage some actual experts on this, and I want to hear their perspectives on the story Calpihate presents. The fundamental questions the podcast asked are still very live: What was it like to live under ISIS? How did that organization operate in the areas where it had control? And so on.

Editing to add: I'm not sure how to trust further work from Rukmini Callimachi. The fact she's still working at the Times, with no information on how they'll be vetting her work, is concerning.

I'd recommend the 2019 pseudo-blacklisted documentary Salafistes^1 (released as Jihadists in the US) if you want an unvarnished view of Salafist Islam.

---

1 - https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jihadists

Did we listen to the same podcast? It still had a lot of information and value even if you entirely remove Chaudhry's story. And even for his story, it was very clearly presented as not fully certain. I wouldn't call it "nearly-fiction", it's closer to your average True Crime podcast where you are presented with the known information and it's up to you to decide if you believe it or not.

It absolutely did have a lot of other information in it. However, the mistake here was so substantial that it's hard for me to feel like I can trust the rest of its reporting. Remember, it was not presented as true crime - it was presented as investigative journalism. I don't hold average true crime podcasts, which are usually non-experts quoting secondary sources in an obviously non-expert context, to the same standard.

> "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,"

This should serve as a warning to anybody who trusts “anonymous sources familiar with the matter”.

Unfortunately this seems to have become the basis for a lot of entertainment reporting like what you find in the NYT. The allure is just too strong, and the economic necessity of keeping people coming back for their fresh 2 minutes hate is too powerful.

I worry that the damage to public understanding of the world that people have is going to take a long time to reverse.

At least they had the decency to retract. I get the sense that other news sites these days would leave it up with its "alternative facts".

E.g. Bloomberg’s The Big Hack

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Here's another classic: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...

Could you elaborate on the problems with this article? I couldn't find any info online.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/bloomberg...

Yeah, I don't get the hate here. You don't complain about companies doing the right thing if you want them to do it more and better.

Also, every day Facebook does 10,000 times the damage that this has done. Perspective, people.

If they were ever doing their jobs this never would have seen the light of day. Even the most basic amount of research showed it was unsubstantiated.

Same with 1619 which is “problematic”.

Their desire to push a narrative outweighed their desire to be factually correct.

The scandal here isn’t they removed something quietly. It’s that if they failed their jobs here, where else are they failing and just haven’t been exposed yet? This isn’t the first time they lied to you, it’s just a time they were caught.

> If they were ever doing their jobs this never would have seen the light of day.

Yes, it could not be more obvious that people fucked up.

Now you have an opportunity to decide whether you're more interested in nurturing your retroactive rage and inciting it in others, or if it might make more sense to reinforce the responsible media behavior that you say you want. In my experience, the latter is more effective and better for mental health.

> This fall, as Canadian authorities were wrapping up an investigation on Chaudhry, Callimachi similarly championed her series. On Twitter, she raised questions about the competence of Canadian intelligence officials in the Chaudhry case. The Times defended her piece to The Washington Post and others, saying the reporting proved to be true and that doubts about Chaudhry's account were central to the podcast's narrative.

This isn't "coming clean", it's getting busted. They had a chance at the former several months ago, and they forwent it.

Just curious, my understanding is that Canada's case is only getting started. Yes, they charged him for "hoax", but it could very well be a trap: Chaudhry has to either provide proof that he is an ISIS fighter, or admit it was all a hoax.

Either way, we won't know for sure until the case is over. So far it's just alleged.

You know I'm sure we can fault their fact checkers on this, but given what certain other news sources do (like constantly twist the truth and support the actions of a tyrannical President) I'll keep sailing along and trusting the Times. Stuff happens.

I was once a subscriber to the NYT and am within their ideological range to enjoy most of their reporting. I feel as if since 2016 they've lost a lot of credibility. Their reporting feels like editorials, and their internal issues often become public. It seems like a highly political newsroom (i.e., "what facts ought we to report" instead of "what are the facts to report"). I subscribe to a more local newspaper now instead.

>I was once a subscriber to the NYT and am within their ideological range to enjoy most of their reporting. I feel as if since 2016 they've lost a lot of credibility. Their reporting feels like editorials, and their internal issues often become public. It seems like a highly political newsroom (i.e., "what facts ought we to report" instead of "what are the facts to report"). I subscribe to a more local newspaper now instead.

The Times pointed out the day after Trump's election stunned the press (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...) that

>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.

>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.

In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump in 2016), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.

(This obviously didn't last.)

Was a subscriber too. cancelled for its politicizing everything, and a superficial and biased China desk.

Now I subscribe to New Yorker and Bloomberg.

As if retraction is enough. The entire main stream media has lost all credibility. And if you are on the opposite side of the political spectrum of the 95% of media, then you are aware of a lot more fake journalism done by the media and yet get called names by people.

Even now, reading through the comments, it seems like a lot of people are congratulating NYTimes for finally admitting their entire podcast was bust. After all the damage has already been done, majority of the retractions don't even get to most people who read/listened to the original fake journalism and NYTimes is only retracting now because they got caught and they ignored all the multiple challenges which were raised originally.

> The entire main stream media has lost all credibility.

This is such baloney. Yes, the main stream media does have certain biases that may swing what they choose to report on, and how they choose to report it.

But fundamentally the main stream media still cares about fact and truth. When confronted with evidence the story was falsified, the NYTimes convened an investigation, issued a retraction, returned the Peabody, and reassigned the reporter. You may argue "too little, too late", but they addressed their mistake.

Compare that with much of the "alternative" media, that when presented with clear evidence of fraud or lies, usually just doubles down and screams those lies on repeat.

It is so hard for media mastheads to build and maintain trust, and so easy to destroy that trust which can then take years to rebuild.

Many people still operate on the last century paradigm of a few 'trusted' impartial news sources 'telling it like it is'.

Once these huge organizations lose credibility we find ourselves in the situation Soviet union era citizens were in with the official party organ Pravda - not believing a word of the official line and reading between the lines for clues...

I think that these "impartial organizations" have always had some credibility issues (although it has accelerated with journalism's decline).

The democratization of information brought by social media has led to the "fake news" epidemic, but has also allowed smart people to coordinate and discover instances where these organizations are lying, whereas in the past it would take years to come to light.

I think we do have those organizations with trust.

If you want facts only news, go to apnews or reuters. They are the mastheads of impartiality, or at least as much as possible with humans.

However, the NYT is what I consider as investigative journalism that includes informed speculation. A lot of stories that otherwise never would have seen the light of day were broken by the NYT, however at the time of publishing there was a degree of uncertainty given the nature of the story. The uncertainty means they could be wrong, even if the odds are high at 90% correct. However, I would argue both are valuable, just understand which you are reading.

I'd suggest apnews & reuters have lost much impartiality credibility, resulting in the rise of populism. We have Trump & Sanders as a result over the last ten years and a vacuum where a reliable trusted and impartial media should be.

Text-only version of this article: https://text.npr.org/944594193

The NYT wrote the following about the series:

Told over the course of one year in 11 cinematic episodes, ‘Caliphate’ marries the new journalism of podcasting -- stories told with sound design, musical scoring and high production values -- with traditional boots-on-the-ground journalism.

This worries me. Hard reporting may find very boring stories. The need to make them "cinematic" really tempts the reporter and producers to make the story more sensational than they are. In this case, they appear to have made grave errors.

Edit: I would also like to highlight the following twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1339998013922701312

Indeed, in addition I personally have never thought of podcasting as something with sound design, musical scoring, and high production values. Some of my favorite podcasts are really just a few people talking over skype or sharing a mic. Literally, the opposite of the description which is clearly just an old media outlet trying to maintain relevance.

It's very poor, the lack of double checking prior to publication of the podcast. I listened to it all and he was easily the weakest cast member.

NYT have admitted their mistake, returned their award. However, it's not on todays front page, but "Here are 10 great The Daily's" is, which is insidious and in poor taste.

The dumbest mistake is that something as hideous as a caliphate does not need some wannabe braggadocio to explain this.

Show me an objective publication and I'll show you a person with confirmation bias. I've come to accept that every media outlet is pushing an agenda, intentionally or not. It may be impossible to escape.

I think the best we can do is be cognizant of the intentions and ideological slant of the people and institutions and be extremely skeptical of these PR firms masquerading as objective media.

I don't think that's true, there are just a scant few publications that actually value real, classic journalism these days.

One example is Reuters. They report facts, stated exactly as things happened, without editorializing and injecting their own opinions on top of every other sentence.

In other words, they let you form your own opinions, instead of giving you theirs. That's called journalistic integrity, and it's the reason they're the only news source I actually pay for.

Even if you only report facts as they happen bias is injected by what facts are reported and what stories are covered or omitted. The reporter will naturally be drawn to stories that match up with their perspective on the world. It's very difficult for us to actively and constantly challenge our own assumptions and seek out evidence that contradicts them.

I've thought about this a lot. I think that if an outlet is reporting on some statistical fact. Like the frequency of mass shooting deaths for example they should also place that in perspective against car accidents, cancer, heart disease etc. Contrast that with crime and murder trends over a large swath of time etc. This way people can properly contextualize and rank the real risk in the situation and separate it from the sensationalism.

But even if all of that is carried out. There is still bias from what the reporter chose to write a story about.

I think the worst offenders of situations like this are the investigative NPR style stories where a reporter seeks out an individual's story as a means to emotionally manipulate the reader into a particular policy position. It's far better to look at the larger statistical picture. You can find a sob story to emotionally manipulate people towards quite literally any policy position imaginable.

This is the worrying bit for me. "Even when confronting some of them, the reporting and producing team sought ways to show his story could still turn out to be true."

It says they didn't seek to mislead the public and yet they were pulling the story at the seams to make it fit.

Journalism should operate entirely on the scientific method. Assume false until you have nothing left to poke holes wit.

> "She's a powerful reporter who we imbued with a great deal of power and authority," he says. "She was regarded at that moment as, you know, as big a deal ISIS reporter as there was in the world. And there's no question that that was one of the driving forces of the story."

Deifying people is unlikely to go well.

Did they actually meet the guy at the time, or know where he was? What is the ethical status of that -- if he was admitting to murders to them, don't they have an obligation to turn him in? I didn't think journalist-source privileged would cover beheading civilians?

good journalism is not unlike good science. both seek to unearth truths.

good journalists present a conclusion based on facts.

bad journalists present facts based on a conclusion.

truth != narrative.

good journalism is extremely difficult and not appreciated enough. we need to increase compensation of good journalists.

>> In posting real-time analyses on social media about unfolding terrorism attacks, Callimachi has helped to cement her reputation as a leading source on terrorism.

Seek karma for too long and eventually karma will seek you

The NYT is good for crosswords and that's about it.

Day two and this news is again not on todays front page, but "Here are 10 great The Daily's" still is.

Offtopic, but the NPR is one of the few sites that I cannot read at all with cookies and javascript disabled.

Try changing ‘www’ to ‘text’ in the URL to get the plainer version of the site. That might help. Here is the modified link:

https://text.npr.org/2020/12/18/944594193/new-york-times-ret...

Thanks! I love NPR but always had trouble with the unbreakable cookie barrier.

They have a text-only version of their site. For single articles, just replace the 'www' subdomain with 'text':

https://text.npr.org/944594193

Did this submission get deleted? I can't favorite it.

But they won't fire Rukmini Callimachi? Why not?

It's the NYT. If the Judith Miller nonsense didn't reveal to you what they're like, and you're still listening, you deserve the crap information you get.

Perhaps we'll get a series called 'Media Empire' which explains this allure?

Why are some people so obsessed with every little thing that NYT gets wrong? It's the same with California, any bit of bad news out of California is blown up into a national story.

To me this obsession with NYT and California is obvious propaganda. It's what 1984 would call "two minutes hate".

Possibly, and I am just spit ballin' here, it is because to some people the ideas brought forth by the NYT and California's government generally come with an air of them knowing what is best for everyone else, what you should and shouldn't believe, and what is and isn't a problem. To many, right or wrong, it comes across as judgmental or condemning so they are eager to point out any faults.

"An air"? The obsessive hate doesn't sound that rational.

What?

Could’ve been avoided if the people in charge knew it was false from the beginning.

Isn’t that sort of the whole idea here?

That's the point. They had numerous reasons to believe he was lying and they chose to ignore them.

Sadly it no longer surprises me to see the NY Times reporting what they want to be true rather than reporting the actual truth.

I'm fine with calling out the NYT for making a mistake or worse enabling substandard journalism. There has been a review of this content, a large organization that has a lot of reporters generating content. The NYT could have done a better job on this. Kudos for the NYT for admitting its mistake. It's not the first, it won't be the last.

I just have one problem with some of the commentary here - I'm willing to wager a sizable portion of the commenters on this board who are experiencing schadenfreude because they hate the NYT most likely get their news from a significantly less reputable news source that would never admit to making a mistake or perform a correction.

Maybe you hate the NYT because it's too liberal and you listen/watch/read the WSJ or Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe it's because you think the NYT isn't 'liberal' enough, and you read Jacobin or Common Dreams or watch MSNBC. This isn't about your concern over adherence to the truth. Many of these comments is about your joy when you point a finger and laugh like Nelson from the Simpsons when the news source that doesn't completely and consistently deliver the information that fits your exact and already hardened world view has anything that diminishes it's credibility.

This is like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald accusing the media of covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story. Both want to destroy the same political contingent but for completely different reasons.

If you are holding the NYT to a standard that your own news source does not adhere to you are the problem.

Rukmini Callimachi, the "journalist" at the center of this podcast series, is essentially Scott Templeton from The Wire.

https://thewire.fandom.com/wiki/Scott_Templeton

I'm suprised why people are still suprised by this.

Has no-one learned by now that you cannot trust _ANYTHING_ that the media produces?

I don't know why you're calling out the media specifically. Are the anonymous commentariat, politicians, and random youtubers somehow more reliablie?

I don’t think this is true at all. I would guess 95% of what is in nytimes is true.

Are they always right and never have a political slant , of course not.

It is interesting to see that when nytimes do print something that is obviously false for political purposes it is usually leaving right not left. The most obvious example being the build up to the Iraq war.

> I would guess 95% of what is in nytimes is true.

This is even worse. The most dangerous lie is a lie wrapped around a core of truth that entices readers to trust the whole package.

Are you mixing up "it happens that the media is untrustworthy" with "nothing the media produces is trustworthy"? If so, may I suggest a logic course before venturing forward?

I don't, but I do trust the web of media, once there are multiple corroborating reports of the same thing it is vastly more likely to be true.

Few people do this because the comforting lies you tell yourself fall away rather quickly.

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