Hasnain says:

Eye opening take and some hard hitting journalism investigating failures in the media rooms at the Times and why it’s so hard to get quality journalism these days.

“Three Times journalists who cover the Middle East, who all asked to speak anonymously so as not to risk their jobs, told me that they and several of their colleagues had raised concerns with senior editors about Callimachi’s methods beginning with her first stories for the paper in 2014. They were ignored or intimidated into silence.

“Senior editors doubled down on the narratives that they wanted her to produce,” one correspondent told me, “and also doubled down on their own decision to make Rukmini a star. Anything that challenged that, they wanted to disregard or discredit.” In the aftermath of Caliphate’s disgrace, this reporter continued, some of them have “owned up to it privately, but not publicly. The Times has not been transparent.” From the start, according to the Times reporters I spoke to, Callimachi was encouraged to write blockbuster stories without any of the institutional checks that should have gone with the brief. (The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.)”

Posted on 2021-04-20T05:29:44+0000