Hacker Cinema
Caliphate
Kalifat
2020 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Niklas Rockström, Wilhelm Berhman
National Security agent Fatima receives a tip that a terrorist attack against Sweden is in the planning stage. Meanwhile Sulle, a teenage girl in Stockholm, gets interested in her student assistant who opens doors to a new and fascinating world - the true path. Kalifat is a thriller about the intermingled fates of five young women who get caught up in the seducing and destroying force of religious fundamentalism.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Maybe I came off as more definitive than I intended. I agree with the retraction. It was required, but it's really more of a follow-on than a retraction. An apology to Canadian police is more necessary, probably. That's a no-fault too though, in my estimation. They had to keep quiet while investigating, and temporarily absorb criticism. That's a hazard of the job though.
I see nothing wrong with this tweet, never mind "career-ending."
"1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm"
Shades of uncertainty. This is honest journalism. Whether or not she felt overconfident in any given detail or narrative, the we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.
I am not a journalist. I can tell from that podcast that there are reasons for the strong reaction that look different from a journalistic perspective and a layman's one. I think the difference (to me) is frame.
If in episode 3, she totally believes his account and by episode 6 she's dubious... that's the nature of doing investigative journalism as a temporal series.
Yeah, this was my reaction as well. The reason I found Caliphate interesting was not the details of Chaudhry's story, which I experienced as were portrayed as dubious and in need of verification throughout; I certainly finished the podcast feeling uncertain whether Chaudhry had actually done any of the things he claimed.
Instead, the reason I've recommended this podcast to friends is that it spends most of its time on a fascinating exploration of the journalistic process. How does reporter verify claims made by people about events in a war zone? The people you interview have a reason to lie to you, sneaking across borders doesn't generate passport stamps, and reliable records are hard to come by.
This latest news feels like an interesting addendum to all that; I'd have expected any other podcast publisher to do an additional episode or two covering the new evidence and grappling with what that changes about the conclusions one can draw (certainly Serial has done a number of updates on new evidence about its past stories).
That said, my sense is that the NYT is taking this extreme action in part because they in retrospect are unhappy with the fact-checking process for the podcast, and I could see that sort of concern motivating this type of retraction/disowning despite all the uncertainty the podcast itself presented.
The NYT wrote the following about the series:
Told over the course of one year in 11 cinematic episodes, ‘Caliphate’ marries the new journalism of podcasting -- stories told with sound design, musical scoring and high production values -- with traditional boots-on-the-ground journalism.
This worries me. Hard reporting may find very boring stories. The need to make them "cinematic" really tempts the reporter and producers to make the story more sensational than they are. In this case, they appear to have made grave errors.
Edit: I would also like to highlight the following twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1339998013922701312
I've started listening to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks while riding my bike. Here's some of my favorites:
Storytelling: This American Life, Reply All, The Moth
Business / Finance: Startups For the Rest of us, The Indie Hackers Podcast, The SaaS Podcast, Planet Money
Comedy: Comedy Bang Bang, Hollywood Handbook, John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme
Science / History: The Infinite Monkey Cage, Stuff You Should Know, Hardcore History, Behind the Bastards
Philosophy / Discussion: The Knowledge Project, Think Again
I've tried listening to a lot of other podcasts, but these are the ones I keep coming back to.
I'll also listen to The Tim Ferriss Show if there's an interesting guest. He had an awesome conversation with Drew Houston recently, and there were lots of interesting stories from the early days of Dropbox.
I also really enjoyed Caliphate, but it's a mini-series that's finished.
They used Google Earth in this podcast episode too: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/podcasts/caliphate-transcript-chapter-six-paper-trail.html (Caliphate).
Some other interesting investigative materials from the same podcast (Warning: may contain violence/nsfw etc):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-photos.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-mosul-iraq.html