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But the reporter believed it was most likely that part of the story was true. There was corroboration from sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they b

by cowpig 6y ago

But the reporter believed it was most likely that part of the story was true. There was corroboration from sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS, and the photo he had on his phone that was taken in Syria. In retrospect, they are saying the needle moved from "more likely true" to "more likely fabricated." In any case the story he was telling was believable, and painted a realistic picture of what was happening in the region. So it's not nearly so black and white

hitekker 6y ago
> In the interview with NPR lasting nearly an hour, Baquet says the Times did not have evidence Chaudhry had ever been to Syria. Nor could it show he had joined ISIS, much less killed civilians for the group. The man's account proved to be riddled with holes and contradictions. Even when confronting some of them, the reporting and producing team sought ways to show his story could still turn out to be true. At this point, you can either believe NPR, "his story was not fact-checked at all", or the New York Times, "we did our due diligence." One is telling the truth, and the other is lying. You can't believe them both without descending into doublethink.
- Khaine 6y ago
  I mean, they both can be true if the NYT is just really incompetent at fact checking.
danso 6y ago
That the reporter was credulous enough to believe the faker's story to be "most likely" true is the very thing that she needs to answer for. Sorry, but "sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS" is just not a foundation of evidence, especially since the NYT refuse to describe the sources beyond the vaguest of terms (e.g. we have no idea whether one U.S. source is just agreeing that he's heard rumors from another U.S. source). Do we really need to reiterate the long history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy doing things like putting children on the no-fly list? The main thing that matters is the documentable evidence that the NYT had access to. Like his passport stamps and social media. To quote from the NYT's investigation [0]: > But far from proving Mr. Chaudhry’s jihadist bona fides, at least one of the pictures was a brazen copy of widely available news photography, The Times’s examination found. The original image had been taken months earlier by a photographer for the official Russian news agency, Tass, and had been distributed by Getty Images, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of photographs... > Other images Mr. Chaudhry provided as evidence that he had gone to Syria — specifically, snapshots he said he had taken of armed men at the beach, whom he described as his “fellow fighters” — also proved to be identical to photographs that had been posted on Twitter years before by Syrian antiwar activists, The Times’s examination found. And as with other images, Mr. Chaudhry misrepresented — or perhaps didn’t actually know — where, and sometimes when, they had been taken. So either the NYT went ahead with publishing this full fledged project knowing that Mr. Chaudhry, the subject, had stolen photos and claimed them as his own. Or, they went ahead and accepted his social media photos as evidence, without even doing a cursory reverse image search – which is unconscionable given the severe and immediate doubts raised by Mr. Chaudhry's passport. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphate-chaudhry-hoax.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

by cowpig 6y ago

hitekker 6y ago

> In the interview with NPR lasting nearly an hour, Baquet says the Times did not have evidence Chaudhry had ever been to Syria. Nor could it show he had joined ISIS, much less killed civilians for the group. The man's account proved to be riddled with holes and contradictions. Even when confronting some of them, the reporting and producing team sought ways to show his story could still turn out to be true. At this point, you can either believe NPR, "his story was not fact-checked at all", or the New York Times, "we did our due diligence." One is telling the truth, and the other is lying. You can't believe them both without descending into doublethink.

Khaine 6y ago
I mean, they both can be true if the NYT is just really incompetent at fact checking.

danso 6y ago

That the reporter was credulous enough to believe the faker's story to be "most likely" true is the very thing that she needs to answer for. Sorry, but "sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS" is just not a foundation of evidence, especially since the NYT refuse to describe the sources beyond the vaguest of terms (e.g. we have no idea whether one U.S. source is just agreeing that he's heard rumors from another U.S. source). Do we really need to reiterate the long history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy doing things like putting children on the no-fly list? The main thing that matters is the documentable evidence that the NYT had access to. Like his passport stamps and social media. To quote from the NYT's investigation [0]: > But far from proving Mr. Chaudhry’s jihadist bona fides, at least one of the pictures was a brazen copy of widely available news photography, The Times’s examination found. The original image had been taken months earlier by a photographer for the official Russian news agency, Tass, and had been distributed by Getty Images, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of photographs... > Other images Mr. Chaudhry provided as evidence that he had gone to Syria — specifically, snapshots he said he had taken of armed men at the beach, whom he described as his “fellow fighters” — also proved to be identical to photographs that had been posted on Twitter years before by Syrian antiwar activists, The Times’s examination found. And as with other images, Mr. Chaudhry misrepresented — or perhaps didn’t actually know — where, and sometimes when, they had been taken. So either the NYT went ahead with publishing this full fledged project knowing that Mr. Chaudhry, the subject, had stolen photos and claimed them as his own. Or, they went ahead and accepted his social media photos as evidence, without even doing a cursory reverse image search – which is unconscionable given the severe and immediate doubts raised by Mr. Chaudhry's passport. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphate-chaudhry-hoax.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...