New York Times Admits Its Caliphate Podcast Fell for ISIS Hoaxer’s Bullshit

The New York Times on Friday released the findings of its internal investigation into star reporter Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS and extremism in the Middle East. The newspaper acknowledged that its Caliphate podcast gave “too much credence to the false or exaggerated accounts” of one of its main subjects, Shehroze Chaudhry, who has since been charged in Canada with concocting a terrorist hoax.

The paper of record rolled out its executive editor, Dean Baquet, on Friday to explain the glaring errors in another podcast, this time a “special episode” of The Daily. Baquet said: “When The New York Times does deep, big, ambitious journalism in any format, we put it to a tremendous amount of scrutiny at the upper levels of the newsroom... We did not do that in this case.”