Resignation
andymills.work
andymills.work
> While I remain proud of our team and what we were able to accomplish with Caliphate, getting any aspect of any story wrong, by any degree, is a journalist’s worst nightmare. After Caliphate was corrected, in print and in audio, peers of mine in the audio industry, from outside of The Times, began to raise questions about why I had been allowed to remain in my position.
I can't speak to the rest of this resignation, but it's sort of wild to see Caliphate described this way. When my understanding is that the main person they interviewed was lying and the podcast is mostly fiction. And then he goes on to say that he had "engaged in rigorous and careful journalism".
This Vulture article is a good overall summary of the timeline, which I would absolutely call a "scandal." https://www.vulture.com/2021/01/caliphate-controversy-new-yo...
Those who are replying here to decry "cancel culture" are falling for his story. This guy is resigning in disgrace for producing journalism so bad, so false in every regard, not just in one article but in an entire podcast spanning months, that his employer had to return his Peabody award.
Andy wants you to think that he's leaving because a Twitter mob is mad at him for giving a co-worker a back rub, and if you fall for this, you're Andy's next victim.
> The Verge’s Ashley Carman echoed this critique in her piece on the Times’ December determination, when she identified this as an expression of the dangers around the modern media intellectual property gold rush, which podcasting as an industry has aggressively internalized as a growth hormone
a pediatrician who gave babies placebo vaccinations and was then demoted and assigned to “what does being a doctor actually mean” class and then quit, and then told everyone he was fired because people found out he got speeding tickets constantly would be dismissed out of hand once everyone found out about the whole fake baby vaccination thing.
andy is a liar. he purposefully mislead his colleagues when he had good reasons to doubt the credibility of his single source. he produced a work of fiction and the premiere newspaper in the world took it as carte blanche and shared it with the world as the truth. it does not matter what happened with him a decade ago, or three years ago, or even immediately before caliphate. the only relevant thing in this story is that he failed miserably at his only job.
I don't know anything about any of this but I am wondering, if believing his story makes me his next victim, who are his previous victims?
I found this odd and stupid. Just because NYT says they have a fact checking department doesn’t absolve me of critical thinking, source development, and my own confirmation. It also seems reasonable to validate this claim from NYT to understand how they fact check. It also seems like if there was a third party fact checking me, I’d be aware because they would start with info from me and they would talk with my sources who talked with me.
This makes me think how crazy it would be to not bug test my software because someone told me the company has a testbot. But I don’t see any tests anywhere and don’t see output of tests anywhere. And there’s a syntax error that would be found if anyone even tried to compile or run.
An excerpt:
> 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.
To me, where this went off the rails was when Caliphate turned into a story about privilege and an individual's character, regardless of the truth behind it. I can see why it was allowed to happen, because it distracts from the institutional pattern of behavior by the NYT. Based on the characterization here and my understanding of the Caliphate story, this does not feel like justice. It feels like a witch hunt.
Was it a cover-up of bad behavior when Amazon refused to release the name and/or fire the engineer whose error caused the 2017 S3 outage? We don't fire or shame those people, and they arguably do just as much damage to the credibility of the organization they work for. Instead, a retrospective is held, they determine how it was possible such a thing could happen, and new checks and balances come out of it. Often you can even read about the entire thing, as is the case in the example I mention[1].
The Caliphate situation tells me that such a thing will likely happen again at the New York Times without better process to prevent these issues. That the institution of journalism wants to blame the person instead of generate learnings, I'm inclined to think nothing changed.
It’s both an institutional failure and an individual one.
We know bugs and mistakes happen.
If an organization has a QA or testing process and the code passed through the accepted processes and yet the still failed, we may not hold the engineer responsible.
If an engineer on the other hand, ships code which has not been tested, when a testing process exists, then we might well hold them responsible.
In this situation, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect Mills to be responsible for making sure the fact checking has been done before considering his work ready for publication even if he wasn’t the one doing it. Just like a release engineer may be responsible for making sure the release has been through QA.
There are mistakes that are considered table stakes for a role or a job and I’m for demotion of those individuals for it, but I don’t like seeing this cancel culture ruin lives.
It’s very high school and immature.
I might argue that the freedom to not bake cakes or employ gay people with regards to religious rights is also part of the freedom of association. People either feel the love or they don't.
But it does motivate discussion on fraternity. A discussion of the disarmament of relations must begin with the movement of not only words.
Why another person chooses to do with their genitals is generally no not your business.
It is not a "freedom". It is prejudice and bigotry
In that way I would argue these moral results, which speaks more loudly than moral actions or moral speech combined, hangs in the air like a moral odor as we discuss the disarmament of relations.
Do we think people should be free to be bigoted?
People can discriminate all they want to so long as they don’t infringe of the freedoms of others. Businesses should be required to not discriminate because it would impede the other party’s freedoms. I don’t have a choice for some things, I have to buy from a certain business. Should they discriminate against me I have no other option. If a person discriminated against me I can just punch them in the face (figuratively) and go elsewhere. Businesses should be required by law to abide by EEO/EOE laws for their customers as well as for their employees.
Being forced to do work they don’t want to do would impede the first party’s freedoms.
If you claim this:
“I don’t have a choice for some things, I have to buy from a certain business.”
Then you claim that people can simply leave a job.
What if they also have no choice and have to work at a certain business?
By what process? The list may not be ironclad, but presumably someone has to actually make a list.
Or are you saying we don’t need a list?
If a patron of a business comes to do business, that business should welcome the business and ignore the personal biases and their own bigoted beliefs.
Criteria in this case being the same equal opportunity laws for employment should be applied towards the front of house.
Same folks who determine EOE law violations, same folks who determine discrimination violations.
This is a completely subjective criteria.
So now you have an appointed group who gets to force people to do work, under penalty of law.
That seems like a bad idea.
I am against bigotry.
I question the use of force as a way to alleviate it.
Mistakes are not binary, some of them are worse than others.
Messing up the spelling of someone's name is common and a subject of regular jest amongst journalists.
Slightly misquoting someone might be subject to some kind of internal discipline, it will at least lead to a correction being published.
Publishing mostly fiction without the exercise of fact-checking is much less forgivable in a news organisation. Willing credulity is not the standard journalists should be held to.
His story isn’t unique though about how social media descends on an individual to ruin their lives. He mentioned how the campaign made its way into the NYT via Twitter. All I’m saying is that we are all human, we all make mistakes, we should all be given an opportunity to learn from and grow from those mistakes.
Does he need to be publicly visible in NYT’s, probably not considering the history.
Could he produce shows where he’s not asked to determine the truth but just report it, possibly.
There are levels to mistakes, I hear you, and to make a public post about it on his blog definitively shows he doesn’t exactly know why this is happening to him or he wants to make a big grand stand about it.
Doesn’t matter. My statement still stands. People make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes have nothing to do with their jobs and yet, canceled...
I couldn't tell from the article.
Break every rule of your profession and publish a bunch of BS? We'll give you another chance. Gave an inappropriate backrub 10 years ago? You're out!
He should have been fired for Caliphate and expressly for Caliphate.
Look at the author of this piece.
Do you think a journalist who has no journalistic integrity is going to admit he got fired because he has no journalistic integrity?
Easier to get a sympathy by claiming it was about back rubs.
That said, seems like the easier narrative for the NYT to go with as well -- they don't have to own up to their editorial failures up the chain that way.
Andy Mills is not going to prison. Being called out publically for toxic behavior towards colleagues is not exactly a ruined life. He will be fine (just not as fine as when peers did not speak up).
Also "we all make mistakes". We are talking about an adult, who got a grown-up's salary, some mistakes are worse than others, and you should not make the same mistake again and again and again. Consequences help with that.
Oh please. If cancel culture were about learning from your mistakes we wouldn't haunt people for things they did decades ago.
But anyway: if there are no negative consequences, I seriously doubt the perpetrator will even consider their action a mistake.
What happened to
* learn from your mistakes
* trial and error
* getting wiser as you grow up
* growing up means talk less and think and act more
Where are we going people?
I cannot imagine what young kids go through in this time and day when they do a mistake.
Are we forbidden from making something stupid and silly?
This is not normal everyone, not normal at all :/
You know what they say: what goes around, comes around.
Those who go after anyone who has a different opinion than theirs, will face their own actions eventually, one way or another.
What I have stated is a realization: you are not allowed to make mistakes anymore, because you are immediately condemned; period!
This downvoting here proves my point 100%.
Welcome to the era of "Cancel everything because we say so".
At some point, when everyone’s skeletons come out of the closet, people will become more forgiving and more hopeful that people can change their behaviors. We’ll start judging people on what they can do in the future, not what they did in the past.
It’s easy to judge people on their past. It’s much harder to judge people on their unknown future. But we’ll get there.
You don't know what those people think. That's the nature of downvoting. All you know is the aggregate score for your comment. That's the nature of this moderated comment system.
I’m not saying that’s what Andy is doing here, but I’d encourage readers to keep an open mind that he may be selective in his frankness, and may not even have full recall of his actions.
Any person subjecting themselves to widespread scrutiny is still accountable to others. I’m not familiar enough with any of these details to take any kind of a side, I just think it’s important to add the context that large scale self-accountability doesn’t have to trample other voices of external accountability; that one’s self-portrayal or self-image might be limited, especially when intoxicated; and that smaller stakes ownership of bad behavior is a common tactic of people avoiding larger stakes scrutiny.
That said, I don’t know the guy at all. Just want to make sure bullshit sensors of anyone invested in the post have an additional opportunity for calibration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/business/media/andy-mills...
There is an interesting piece on NPR[1] about the Caliphate thing. Note that it was a runner up for a Pulitzer and won the Peabody award, and it's primary source was lying.
So to contextualize some of the drama, understand that journalists aspire to an award like that. Just as a scientist might aspire to a Nobel Prize. And when such an award is won by a peer it is celebrated, unless it was won through "cheating." Whether it is a journalist who didn't check their source thoroughly or a scientist who falsified data to make the numbers work. The siren call of the award is a powerful force in blinding a person to the possible disqualifying inputs. Very powerful.
I was fortunate to see such an event unfold early in my career with someone I respected who could not, or would not see the warning signs that their "big accomplishment" was not actually an accomplishment. They, like Andy, relied on a third party that didn't see the warning signs as the arbiter of correctness. When it turned out that their big accomplishment wasn't, they could easily blame this third party and present themselves as being blameless. And yet, when it became clear that they should have seen the warning signs as part of their expertise, then the charitable interpretation was that they were just not that great an engineer after all. There were, of course, those who felt the engineer "knew all along" about the problems and were trying to "sneak one by" everyone else. The engineer in question resigned and changed jobs and pretty much faded away.
My take away from that experience was a better understanding of personal integrity. It is hard to take your own ideas and rip them apart, but it is essential that you do so. Because if they can be ripped apart, no matter how attractive they seem, they aren't as great as you think they are. I try to cultivate friendships with people who will do this for me as well. As one of my mentors told me, "Everyone thinks their baby is beautiful, few can appreciate honest feedback." And engineers and managers (especially senior managers) are trained by experience to not to call out the flaws in other peoples ideas to their faces. If you are surrounded by people who won't point out the flaws in your plan, you are at risk of both your plan failing, and having that follow you around for the rest of your days.
I think Andy's resignation post was well written. I'm sorry that he had to go through what he has gone through, and I agree with him that this was the correct next step for him.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/18/944594193/new-york-times-retr...
lol get that shit out of here
The NYT published historical falsehoods as the central claims in one of their highest profile publications of the last decade. That publication was then pilloried by professional historians and widely criticized as ideological propaganda masquerading as historical scholarship, because that's exactly what it was. They later walked back one of the most glaring errors, but only after months of outcry and their fact-checker, a professional historian, going public to say that he had told them what they were saying was untrue but they had printed it anyway. And they couched the correction in the weasel words of a 'clarification', which is an odd way to describe an update that completely changes the meaning of a sentence. They were later caught stealth-editing the piece and claiming that it had never said something else that had originally been its most prominent claim. Where exactly does journalistic integrity fit into this?
The NYT was a fine newspaper once, but that time is no more.
Growing up, I never even imagined that I would get the chance to live in New York City or to work in media -- let alone at the paper of record. I’m from a tiny town of a thousand people in the middle of the corn fields of Illinois. I paid my way through Christian College working as a groundskeeper, a dishwasher, a roofer, and at summer jobs in factories and on farms.
And yet, I ended up having the chance to work for the most important news organization in the world. And I have loved it. I have been able to collaborate with some of the most talented, passionate and creative journalists in the world. I’ve been so proud and grateful for what we’ve been able to accomplish together.
When I was hired as the first full-time audio producer at The Times, the audio department was just an idea, nurtured in an old closet with grey foam panels glued to the walls on the 16th floor. Now it is a pillar of The Times’ journalism and a model for the industry.
Together with Lisa Tobin, Theo Balcomb, and Michael Barbaro, I helped create The Daily in 2017. Since then I’ve gone on to help create and develop series like Rabbit Hole with Kevin Roose and The Field with The Times’ politics team. And, of course, in 2018 I helped create and produce the most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on: Caliphate.
While I remain proud of our team and what we were able to accomplish with Caliphate, getting any aspect of any story wrong, by any degree, is a journalist’s worst nightmare. After Caliphate was corrected, in print and in audio, peers of mine in the audio industry, from outside of The Times, began to raise questions about why I had been allowed to remain in my position.
There are answers to these questions: When it came to fact-checking support for the project, the Times’ leadership told us that they had their own internal system in place for stories of this nature. That system broke down. And they did not blame us. In fact, throughout The Times’ reexamination of Caliphate, they told our production team that we’d engaged in rigorous and careful journalism. One masthead editor even made it a point to tell me: “I won’t let you blame yourself.”
But in the meantime, another story emerged online: that my lack of punishment came down to entitlement and male privilege. That accusation gave some the opportunity to resurface my past personal conduct.
Like all human beings, I have made mistakes that I wish I could take back. Nine years ago, when I first moved to New York City, I regularly attended monthly public radio meet up parties where I looked for love and eventually earned a reputation as a flirt. Eight years ago during a team meeting, I gave a colleague a back rub. Seven years ago I poured a drink on a coworker’s head at a drunken bar party. I look back at those actions with extraordinary regret and embarrassment.
All of this happened while I was working at WNYC. When my managers there confronted me with how my unprofessional behavior was making people feel, I was ashamed. I apologized to the individuals that I’d learned I had upset or made uncomfortable. And I was punished. I received a warning from WNYC’s HR department that I needed to be more professional or look for work elsewhere. I was told to meet with a professional work-place trainer. I was a production assistant at the time, and the promotion to producer that I had been working toward was denied.
I took this reckoning seriously and I continued to work at WNYC for nearly two more years without further incident.
When I started working at The Times, in 2016, I was open with my bosses and colleagues about this experience and what I’d learned from it. They said that they appreciated my candor and defended me publicly, including in New York Magazine in 2018.
At The Times, I have strived to continue to grow and be a better co-worker and person, and not repeat the mistakes of my 20s. All of my reviews have reflected that. Each year as the team grew, I was promoted to higher levels of leadership. In December, my latest promotion was finalized: I was to become our audio department’s director of development. “Ride or die baby! I’m thrilled about this. You are a treasured colleague and an insane talent. So much to come! Looking forward to toasting,” wrote the assistant managing editor who oversees The New York Times’s audio report.
But that was not to be. The allegations on Twitter quickly escalated to the point where my actual shortcomings and past mistakes were replaced with gross exaggerations and baseless claims. Several people have even alleged that I am a predator and a dangerous threat to my colleagues. I have been transformed into a symbol of larger societal evils. As a journalist, it has been especially discouraging and upsetting to see fellow journalists make such claims or retweet them.
The entire experience has been extraordinarily painful. I know I’m not supposed to say that because people will claim that I’m trying to make myself the victim. I know that I still have a lot of room to grow as a person - I can be overly zealous and talk over people, making them feel unheard. I know that this whole letter opens me up to more public shaming and ridicule. But public shaming is very painful. That is the truth. So is leaving the job you love.
And yet, that’s what I feel I need to do. As the pressure of this online campaign has grown to encompass some staffers of The Times, it has led to a climate where, even though I still love the mission of this important institution, I feel it is in the best interest of both myself and my team that I leave the company at this time. I do this with no joy and a heavy heart.
To the journalists, editors, colleagues and friends who’ve reached out with words of encouragement and support over the past several weeks, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your calls and notes have meant more to me than you can know.
To all my colleagues with whom I’ve had the chance to collaborate on such important and ambitious journalism projects throughout these last several years, I will miss working with you dearly. I wish you all the very best. I will keep cheering you on.
At some point, maybe I’ll tell this story more fully, but I got into this work to tell other people’s stories. And for now, I’m going to get back to that.
Andy
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(without having a personal comment on this article ) Is there a more nuanced approach here? Having a job is really different from being in a leadership position at a company that has global reach and impact, no?
In his position, and provided I had the support of the management I would have stayed and not let a baseless online smear campaign force me out.
Leaving this way gives credence to those disparaging his character.
I googled - people are attaching their names to this on twitter. It's not anonymous. It's not "I heard he did x".
It's he did X to me.
We'll find out if any of it is true - but I'm going to guess that a lot of it is. Hence, resigning before he can be fired.
https://twitter.com/imontheradio/status/1343598441226792960?... https://twitter.com/brianabreen/status/1341921383354224640
Also, Radiolab doesn't seem to be downplaying this: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/note-...
I do agree with her that most woman would not have gotten away with these kind of comments.
I mean, this guy probably does deserve to be fired... But Callimachi deserves to be fired right along with him, and she isn't. They were terrible at their jobs.
The reason here highlights two problems: First, that he might be being made the scapegoat, probably to distract from the huge failure of the organization as a whole that that podcast was. And second, that the twitter cancel culture mobs seemingly only want targets they find acceptable; they deliberately didn't target Callimachi but happily settled on him.
It highlights how hypocritical and toxic the cancel culture mentality is. And I don't think it will change if they keep on succeeding.
Remember back when the entire center-left press decided the word "bro" was sexist? I asked people doing it to define the word. So many genuinely had no idea it was short for brother. Their entire awareness and understanding of the term came from trashy think pieces about a west coast subculture. Knowing that meant I could choose to either dismiss them or make a probably-futile attempt to share the rest of the word with them.
Knowing what you, specifically, mean and what you think of those terms leaves me thinking of you what I initially assumed, but at least we're on the same page now. This saves so much time and energy, and avoids a tiresome demon thread.
Thank you.
Likewise. Have a good day.
It sounds like you have been radicalized. Who is this “they” you speak of that is destroying your freedoms? Who is the secret cabal? What is the disconnect between you saying: “this guy probably does deserve to be fired...” along with Callimachi, and thousands of others on a public forums saying the same thing? If you would take a moment to be self reflective, you would be able to see that the “cancel culture” is not a “they”, but it is normal human behavior we all share including yourself.
The current concept of "privilege" whatever its good original intention, has I think turned into a huge toxic mess.
I think it is something that you should bring up about yourself, ie "I have these privileges in life", but never something you should bring up about anyone else.
Giving rights to others is not taking rights away from you. It’s not pie.
If no-one's rights were ever in conflict then politics would be much easier than it actually is.
Religious freedom does not include bigotry as that's not beneficial to anyone. Prisons in USA being terrible garbage does not excuse lack of freedom to gender identity which would harm many more.