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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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 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

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