> The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags
Clearly it would have been better for them to have done their jobs correctly in the first place, but in what way are they not displaying journalistic integrity in this instance? Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.
Mistakes are inevitable (though in this case avoidable). Owning up to publishing something erroneous is the way you display journalistic integrity. I'll trust what you tell me today, if I can trust you to tell me the details you got wrong tomorrow.
> Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.
Ultimately, whether she stays on their payroll is the decider for me as to whether they have journalistic integrity.
I was discussing this with my parents (both former editors of major publications) who have had to fire people for creating composite characters like this. The lack of basic fact checking, followed up by attacking the Canadian authorities [0] once it started to come to light that the story was untrue is very unsavory. I think this should be career-ending.
Several years ago, Rolling Stone published story about a rape that allegedly occurred at a University of Virginia fraternity.
It was the Washington Post and not Rolling Stone themselves that discovered holes in the story. But Rolling Stone owned up to it and engaged the Columbia School of Journalism to investigate the lapses in their reporting and fact-checking processes, resulting in a damning report which RS published in a subsequent issue.
I don't expect NYT to be perpetually fact checking stories after publication, but when they "get busted," I absolutely expect them to re-investigate and publish their findings.
Rolling Stone absolutely did not "own up to it," they repeatedly tried to minimize the damage the article had done to the individuals and groups portrayed in it, and further, even after the Columbia report, stood by all its editors, fact-checkers, and even the writer herself!
First sentence of the article:
> The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags
Clearly it would have been better for them to have done their jobs correctly in the first place, but in what way are they not displaying journalistic integrity in this instance? Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.
Mistakes are inevitable (though in this case avoidable). Owning up to publishing something erroneous is the way you display journalistic integrity. I'll trust what you tell me today, if I can trust you to tell me the details you got wrong tomorrow.