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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Those who would like to know more may want to read the NYT's own repudiation of Caliphate. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/business/media/new-york-t...

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.

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Damn, Vulture pulling no punches

> 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

The Vulture piece reads like the Columbia University review of the Rolling Stone rape hoax.

It seems he should have been removed. But it also seems like the "why" is important -- was it job performance or digging into his history?

if a person who is nominally in a journalistic role ends up producing fabulism and they are then demoted and reassigned, it’s better for that person to lead everyone to believe they were pushed out for irrelevant things many years ago rather than the issue with their work at their workplace that in fact literally just occurred. it’s just confusing, because in any other context i don’t think people would fall for this whataboutism.

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.

Why wasn't he forced to resign essentially immediately afterward, then?

he was reassigned and essentially demoted and given the opportunity (along with the cocreator, who is still at the times) to basically do remedial “how not to lie to everyone” and he decided he was not interested.

There was a decent episode about this story on Canadaland (a podcast about journalism) this week https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/357-califail

> you're Andy's next victim.

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?

The other people he fooled.

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