Caliphate · The New York Times

An Examination of 'Caliphate'

December 18, 2020·30 min·2 clips

The New York Times executive editor admits they were duped by a Canadian man's fabricated ISIS story.

1. New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and reporter Mark Mazzetti explain to host Michael how the Caliphate podcast published a story about a supposed ISIS member named Shiraz Chaudhry that the Times now believes did not meet its accuracy standards. 2. Baquet is the executive editor and most senior news figure at the Times; Mazzetti is a Pulitzer Prize-winning intelligence reporter who led the re-examination team alongside Ian Austin, Graham Bowley, and Maliki Brown. 3. The episode's core purpose is to document how an institutional failure allowed a compelling but apparently fabricated first-person account of ISIS membership to pass the Times' editorial process and reach a mass audience. 4. Chaudhry, also known as Abu Huzaifa, claimed to have spent several months in Syria as a low-level ISIS member, describing acts including doling out lashings and killing two men by stabbing one in the heart. 5. In September 2020, Canadian authorities charged Chaudhry with perpetrating a terrorism hoax — essentially claiming he had fabricated his ISIS identity — which prompted the Times to commission the internal re-examination. 6. Canadian officials ran a four-year investigation and told Mazzetti's team they concluded Chaudhry was not a terrorist and had never traveled to Syria; they reached this conclusion before Caliphate was published. 7. US intelligence officials who in 2018 told the Times that Chaudhry had been an ISIS member in Syria later said they could not recall the case and now support Canada's position that he was never a real threat. 8. Chaudhry's no-fly list status, which the Times cited as corroborating evidence, was explained by the fact that Canadian authorities were actively investigating him at the time — not because he was a confirmed terrorist. 9. ISIS de-radicalization experts who spoke to Chaudhry were divided: one now believes his story was false, while another, an academic researcher, still believes him because of the emotional intensity with which he tells it. 10. Photos Chaudhry showed the Times as proof of his time inside Syria were found to have been taken by others in different locations, including one photograph he called his 'humble abode' that was distributed by a professional photo agency. 11. Mazzetti says officials believe Chaudhry spent extensive time online consuming ISIS propaganda and recruitment videos, which gave him an intimate knowledge of the group without his having joined it. 12. The emir Chaudhry claimed as his ISIS commander — already the subject of a Swedish article — said he recognized Chaudhry's face only with uncertainty and said Chaudhry likely had a military role, contradicting Chaudhry's claim that he had deliberately avoided being a battlefield soldier. 13. A second supposed ISIS official who claimed to recognize Chaudhry spoke only in a brief voice message and may have been told in advance that Chaudhry was Canadian, undermining the significance of his identification. 14. Baquet describes the failure as institutional rather than attributable to any one reporter, including Caliphate host Rukmini Callimachi, and says the standard of evidence was not applied consistently with how the Times handles other major investigative pieces. 15. He compares the lack of scrutiny unfavorably to the Trump finances coverage, where he personally read so many story drafts that 'I could almost do Donald Trump's taxes.' 16. Baquet says he completely regrets not personally scrutinizing Caliphate, and that he and his top deputies failed in their responsibility to examine not only the evidence supporting the story but also the evidence refuting it. 17. The conversation is structured as a formal accountability session — two separate interviews, one with Baquet and one with Mazzetti, conducted by host Michael — with a measured, formal tone throughout. 18. The episode avoids emotional language and stays on specifics: timelines, photograph provenance, government investigation findings, and editorial process failures. 19. Listeners interested in media accountability, journalism ethics, and the institutional review processes of major news organizations. 20. Listeners who want detailed narrative reporting or new disclosures about ISIS rather than a post-mortem analysis of editorial failures.

As heard by us

A careful postmortem on a major story, with the reporting process left fully visible.

Caliphate is a newsroom self-audit around a major ISIS story and the harder question of whether the reporting held up. Dean Baquet explains why the paper reopened the case, brought in skeptical Times journalists, and had Mark Mazzetti's team test the claims against what…

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If you want a newsroom reckoning over a major story, this is the episode to hear.

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