Privately, [Michael] Barbaro repeatedly pressed at least four journalists Friday to temper their critiques of The Times and how they framed what happened. I know, because I was one of them.
So was NPR host and former Middle East correspondent Lulu Garcia-Navarro, whom he admonished to demonstrate restraint and warned was hurting the feelings of people at the newspaper.
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple also received multiple direct messages from Barbaro, especially about his use of the word "retract" on Twitter to describe what happened.
"I happen to believe that in this instance that it is a sign of The New York Times' integrity, that they took this step," said Wemple, who has written extensively about Caliphate. "They should embrace that they retracted it instead of ... tiptoeing around this idea."
Beyond that, Wemple said, The Times should not have assigned Barbaro to interview Baquet about a scandal that he had such close ties to.
"I think it's disqualifying and it's certainly blinding," Wemple said in an interview. "I don't think Michael should have been involved in, you know, in this particular aspect of it. But he is the voice of The New York Times."
Even so, plenty of colleagues at The Times who have rich experiences in podcasting or broadcasting could have pinch-hit: tech columnist Kara Swisher has a podcast through the opinion section; business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin co-hosts a morning show for CNBC; media columnist Ben Smith, who has written about Caliphate previously, used to host a podcast for BuzzFeed; Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham co-host a culture podcast for The Times produced apart from The Daily.
Wemple and Garcia-Navarro are among those on social media (and in Wemple's case, in print) who have challenged The Times' judgment, particularly in dismissing critics of Callimachi's work.
J: This is not the first time Callimachi is the subject of serious scrutiny with respect to her work on the Middle East. Can you tell us more?
LA: Indeed. There was a backlash against Callimachi and the NYT when in 2017 she took more than 15,000 internal ISIS documents out of Iraq without permission from the Iraqi authorities, and which the NYT later published as the “ISIS Files.” She and the NYT were also criticized for not redacting some of the documents and failing to protect Iraqis’ names and personal information, including minors. Her decision to stuff the documents into trash bags and take them out of the country raised larger questions about the ethics and history of what Maryam Saleh of The Intercept calls “outsiders taking historically important documents out of a country at war.”
In the wake of the Caliphate controversy, Callimachi has faced questions about some of her other work, including the case of James Foley: a US journalist who was taken hostage and executed by ISIS in 2014. Foley’s brother Michael said Callimachi “threatened to publish a detailed torture story” about James unless Michael agreed to do an interview.
A story Callimachi wrote in October 2019 about how ISIS was paying protection money to a militia aligned with its arch-rival, al-Qa'ida was apparently based on distortions of specialist opinion. Yet the NYT chose to deal with these claims by merely stating that “experts were divided” about the authenticity of the documents.
Similarly, a Syrian journalist who helped report a story for Callimachi, published in December 2014, recently told the NYT’s Ben Smith that his warnings about the credibility of a source she relied upon were dismissed. “With Rukmini, it felt like the story was pre-reported in her head and she was looking for someone to tell her what she already believed, what she thought would be a great story,” Karam Shoumali told the NYT.
Recently, a leading scholar on Jihadism in the Sahel also criticized her framing of al-Qa'ida in Mali. After the October 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, there were unverified claims in ISIS chatrooms that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, had converted to Islam and carried out the shooting at the behest of ISIS. Callimachi spent days recklessly regurgitating this ISIS chatter to her large Twitter following.
I question whether the NYT would allow this kind of speculation by its reporters covering other subjects. It has also been pointed out that Callimachi does not read or speak Arabic, though much of her high-profile work is based on Arabic language documents.
In general, I believe Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS over-emphasizes religious ideology while stripping the group’s emergence and growth from its geopolitical context, specifically Iraq, a country that was destroyed by the 2003 US invasion and occupation, which also led to the destabilization of the region as a whole. A leitmotif of her work is that ISIS and other Jihadi groups are a legitimate and perhaps revealing manifestation of Islam. By Callimachi’s count, 40,000 Muslim foreigners joined ISIS. In a religion of 1.8 billion, this is a statistically insignificant number for generalizations. Yet she devotes the majority of her reporting on ISIS describing, explaining, and at times acting as a borderline stenographer for, a murderous cult’s religious and theological beliefs and rationalizations.
Up to 960,000 people in Basra to have access to safe drinking water thanks to the Netherlands' support to UNICEF and UNDP
The Netherlands has committed USD $6,41 million to support UNICEF and The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to ensure that almost a million residents of Basra governorate have access to safe water.
