“Caliphate” won two journalism honors in 2019, an Overseas Press Club prize and a Peabody Award. On Friday, when The Times announced the results of its review, the Overseas Press Club rescinded its award, and the executive director of the Peabody Awards accepted The Times’s offer to return the Peabody.
The Times’s review found that “Caliphate,” a 12-part audio documentary about the Islamic State, gave too much credence to the false or exaggerated account of one of its main subjects, Shehroze Chaudhry, a Canadian who claimed to have taken part in atrocities. The Times started examining the podcast after Mr. Chaudhry was arrested by Canadian authorities on Sept. 25 under a terrorism hoax law.
The Times appended an editors’ note to “Caliphate” and added editors’ notes describing problems with two articles by Ms. Callimachi in 2014 and 2019. (“The ISIS Files” does not have an editors’ note attached to it.)
Every episode of “Caliphate” now begins with a correction read by Michael Barbaro, the host of the podcast “The Daily,” who tells listeners that the chapters on Mr. Chaudhry “did not meet our standards for accuracy.” A new installment, “An Examination of ‘Caliphate,’” has also been added to the series. It includes an interview with Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times. In the interview, Mr. Baquet raised the possibility that Mr. Chaudhry had “duped” The Times, but said the news organization was at fault.
“Look, there was a well-known reporter involved in it — Rukmini Callimachi,” he said in the interview. “But this failing isn’t about any one reporter. I think this was an institutional failing.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/media/caliphate-pulitzer.html
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