But generally, news orgs don't commit to doing huge year-long projects/investigations into something they know to be fake. Or, if they do, the story is about the fakery (and the psychology/personality of the person behind it) – it doesn't attempt to pass it off as "maybe true".

The average investigative reporter receives tons of bullshit or otherwise overhyped leads. It benefits no one to elevate each of those into a prestige project.

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

> 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.

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

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/caliphat...

Journalism is the act of hunting for truth. I don't think any reputable outlet goes into an investigation knowing what the outcome is going to be. Journalists are good at looking at evidence and identifying possible outcomes and many times their assumptions turn out to be true after rigorous research, but this is different then knowing what an outcome of a story is going to be.

Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.

Here are the Pulitzers for International Reporting, for which "Caliphate" was a finalist in 2019:

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/210

I challenge you to find another winner or finalist in this category in which the truth value of the published assertions is portrayed as merely optional.

> Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.

Well, it's what the original Serial did. That format has inspired a lot of the podcasting world.

For starters, Serial is universally regarded as an exceptional project – i.e. the exception that proves the rule – and a project that has always been under a considerable amount of controversy. In any case, the podcast itself never insinuated that it could make a case for Adnan Syed's innocence. And more relevant with respect to Caliphate, the foundational facts are not in doubt: Adnan Syed was indeed the ex-boyfriend of the victim, and he was indeed convicted of her murder and serving a life sentence.

I haven't listened to the podcast.

Can I ask, how would you feel about conspiracy videos doing the same thing? Those that present a conspiracy and then show a reporter trying to verify the theory that ends with the reporter indicating they believe "part of [the] story is probably true, but never expresses certainty." I just can't help think that if the topic was aliens or 9/11 instead of the Caliphate and the author was fox news or reason magazine, you'd consider it drivel.

I can't remember what it was, but I feel I've seen such documentaries or podcasts before. As long as it's done in good faith, I'm happy about it. Like if you don't get the impression they're actually trying to convince you of anything, but are more just welcoming you through their own process of learning about something and then ending with a bit of an ambiguous, well I still don't know for sure one way or another, but maybe there is more substance than I thought at first.

Edit: I didn't actually listen to Caliphate though, so I don't know if it appears done in good faith or not.

Well, that's certainly not the way I feel. If aliens haven't been visiting humans for years, I don't want to watch a video going through the process of learning about the possibility that they might have been visiting humans for years and then ending a bit ambiguous.

I don't think this was anything like that, though.

The story that they were investigating was completely plausible because it painted a very realistic picture of things that were happening in Syria at the time.

I suppose the one part of this that is potentially harmful and false is that the ISIS member was living free in Toronto (while bragging about it on social media).

Plausibe is fine to a point. The context here is journalism, and with that comes responsibilities. The fact an outfit as reputable as NYT chose not to fulfill its obligations should give anyone reasonable pause. This was a relatively meaningless story. What happens when something more significant is involed? And the stakes (read: possible revenue) higher?

I suspect your idea of 'very realistic' is from news sources like the NYT and not from actually being to Syria.

As someone who has been to Syria multiple times, I can assure you that US news is much closer to Hollywood than reality.

The meat of the story wasn’t even this guy’s account. I think it was then finding a cache of administrative documents from somewhere in Iraq and having a deep look into ISIS government, its operations etc.