New York Times: ‘Caliphate’ podcast didn’t meet standards

The New York Times admitted Friday that it could not verify the claims of a Canadian man whose account of committing atrocities for the Islamic State in Syria was a central part of its 2018 podcast “Caliphate.”

The series had won a Peabody Award, the first ever for a podcast produced by the newspaper, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

With a major hole blown in the narrative, the Times affixed an audio correction to the beginning of each part of the 12-part podcast and published an investigation into what went wrong with the story in Friday’s newspaper. The story’s central reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, will be reassigned off the terrorism beat, the Times said.