Let's talk about fraud
In the newsroom and on the business-side.
It’s Friday, the day after a snowstorm, so let’s talk about fraud.
Journalism is a hard industry. Reporters talk to people, take complex stories and try to contextualize an event, or series of events, to make them readable. And this, perhaps, is the biggest challenge of being a journalist: people lie to you; all the time.
So reporters talk to multiple people to corroborate stories; they dig through public records and when possible, private communications. And sometimes, reporters lean (knowingly and unknowingly) on unreliable narrators. When those stories run, and the whole world gets to weigh in, they can unravel. Spectacularly.
(Screengrab from The New York Times)
This week, two of the most pre-eminent journalistic operations, The New York Times and The New Yorker, walked back stories because reporters were lied to, and the outlets didn’t do enough due diligence before the articles ran.
In 2018, The New York Times introduced a compelling podcast called Calliphate, a story about extremism and terrorism from a star reporter, Rukmini Callimachi. This was a big production for the paper. It won awards and audiences. But it was a story too good to be true, relying on a source that proved to be a liar.
In September of this year, Canadian authorities arrested the protagonist of the podcast, Abu Huzayfah, whose real name is Shehroze Chaudhry, for “perpetrating a terrorist hoax.”
The Washington Post wrote
The subject of an award-winning New York Times podcast has been charged in Canada for allegedly fabricating tales about his experiences as an Islamic State fighter. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced the charge on Friday in a release:
“The charge stems from numerous media interviews where the accused, Shehroze Chaudhry, a 25-year-old from Burlington, Ontario, claimed he travelled to Syria in 2016 to join the terrorist group ISIS and committed acts of terrorism,” noted the release.
Today, the NYT reports that
Shehroze Chaudhry, the central figure in the 2018 podcast “Caliphate,” by The New York Times, was a fabulist who spun jihadist tales about killing for the Islamic State in Syria, Canadian and American intelligence and law enforcement officials contend.
The paper also put a lengthy editor’s note on the prologue of the podcast, saying, in part
As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of “Caliphate” that presented Mr. Chaudhry’s claims did not meet our standards for accuracy.
In September, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple laid out Callimachi’s “reporting troubles,” writing
Like the awards, the journalistic stumbles of Callimachi have played out in public, right in the pages of the Times. They have prompted Times reporters to raise concerns with their bosses about her work and the reliability of her sources. Those concerns mix with an awkward and anguished institutional culture: Her critics worry that their complaints are interpreted as professional envy toward a multiplatform star of the Times. “There is some internal and external griping about certain elements of Rukmini’s reporting style,” one source told the Erik Wemple Blog in 2018. “She’s a classic giant personality.… She’s very good at describing her work and taking credit for it and living the risk. There are some people on staff who don’t like that.”
In an interview with NPR on Thursday, the Times’ editor, Dean Baquet said
"We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes," New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet tells NPR in an interview on Thursday. "I think we were so in love with it that when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn't listen hard enough."
On Friday, Callimachi posted a comment on Twitter apologizing to readers
The Times investigated its own reporter because, as its marketing slogan says, ‘truth matters.’
Over at The New Yorker, a 2018 award-winning article about Japanese company called Family Romance, a company that basically pays actors to play family members, just received a detailed editors note that says, in part, that it found “strong evidence” that sources “made false biographical claims” to the writer and fact-checker.
What we uncovered suggests that Nishida and Shimada did not provide their real full names (which, out of respect for their privacy, we are withholding here), and that each is married, although they had claimed to be a lonely widower and a single mother, respectively. Shimada is apparently married to Ishii, who also claimed in the piece to be single.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post wrote
In short, the New Yorker found that the people who provided most of the narrative juice in the story — Ishii, Nishida and Shimada — were unreliable. The role players apparently found role-playing a bit too irresistible. “Once we learned of evidence that Yūichi Ishii had made misrepresentations about his business to the Japanese press, we initiated a thorough investigation, which was made more complex by Japanese privacy laws,” notes a New Yorker spokesperson in a statement to this blog. “Based on our findings, we no longer have confidence in what Ishii, Kazushige Nishida, or Reiko Shimada told us. The editors’ note that is appended to the story is now an integral part of the article; we want readers to have this information as they read it.”
Another story with unreliable narrators.
As we’ve talked about many times, with the ‘fake news’ epithet getting hurled at journalists covering everything from politics to sports, stories like these give bad-faith actors more oxygen. Reporters can’t control what unreliable narrators say, but editors should be able to raise the caution flag during the reporting and writing process. Some at the NYT did; some didn’t.
Taking a step outside these stories, the fact we can dissect them is what makes journalism so powerful. We correct our mistakes, in the open, and suffer the consequences in public. Now imagine other industries publicly approaching corrections (if not eat their own) the way media does. Disgraced politicians get cushy corporate gigs; fallen business executives get golden parachutes.
On the business side of media, fraud, we know, runs rampant. Google and Facebook have lawsuits arguing that they colluded to perpetrate a kind of fraud that is both devious and disastrous to journalism.
Gizmodo breaks down the most recent (yes, there are currently three antitrust lawsuits against the search giant) lawsuit from Texas:
According to the AG’s investigations, Facebook didn’t move into header bidding to compete with Google, but instead to “draw Google in” and force a deal. And it apparently worked: The following year, the two companies allegedly came to an agreement that Facebook would “curtail” its header bidding biz and instead route that ad business through Google’s ad platform instead. In return, Google promised that the Facebook Audience Network (FAN)—its third-party ad serving product you can read all about here—would get certain advantages that other platforms didn’t, according to the lawsuit.
In short: According to the AG investigation, Facebook promised to its tank header bidding efforts, and in return, Google let Facebook bid on (and win) more auctions.
And while the industry has moved at the whims of Google and Facebook over the last decade or so, perhaps the biggest implications of fraud are happening from ‘brand safety’ companies that appear to be blocking revenue from publishers at a scale that seems to affect everyone.
Branded, the newsletter from the co-founders of CheckMyAds, detailed this week what should be the biggest topic of discussion between advertisers and publishers:
Dr. Krzysztof Franaszek of Adalytics contacted us with a startling discovery last month: he was able to see how brand safety companies classify every individual news article he reads by right-clicking on “inspect” in Google Chrome. He could see exactly which brands were blocking which articles, because the keyword blocklists of global brands were also sitting out there. In other words, there’s a leak. A pretty big one.
Branded reports that Franaszek was able to see “the real-time ratings behind every article he was reading on the web, from the New York Times to Vice. In other words, he could see the automated signals they use to decide whether to allow or block an ad on a webpage, all within a fraction of a second and in total secrecy.”
As the newsletter points out, brand safety tech “blocked ~$3 billion globally from the news industry last year. We know how one major company's COVID-19 ad keyword blocking forced trusted news sources to forfeit up to 55% of ad placements on their pandemic-related news. And occasionally, we can see with our own eyes when an ad has been blocked from the news.”
It appears that brand safety technology cannot tell the difference between actual offensive content and journalists reporting on the issues to inform the public. Krzysztof’s data shows us that Oracle has aggressively blocked the news:
Grapeshot marked nearly one-third (30.3%) of New York Times articles as unsafe.
Moat marked one-fifth (21.4%) of The Economist as unsafe, including an article about molecular cells which was likely classified under “Death Injury, or Military Conflict” because it mentioned “programmed cell death”
Grapeshot marked half (51.7%) of articles on Vice.com as brand unsafe. (For context, Oracle claims they helped Vice “tackle keyword bias” last year.)
It should not be surprising, then, that the next day, Oracle, which owns Moat and Grapeshot, gave the Wall Street Journal this story:
Oracle Corp.’s data cloud and measurement business said it detected a new instance of fraud in streaming television that likely impacted millions of dollars in advertising spending, signaling a growing problem for advertisers as they move more dollars into the medium.
The operation, which Oracle Data Cloud has dubbed “StreamScam,” took advantage of flaws in streaming-TV ad-serving technology and the supply chain to fool marketers into paying for ads that were never actually seen by viewers on real devices and apps, the company said.
The point to all this: fraud, on the editorial as well as the business side, runs rampant across our industry. Sometimes it’s big and public, like when the source of a story is unreliable throwing the premise of the piece into question. Other times it’s not as public. It’s up to everyone to hold people and companies accountable otherwise we risk ending up in a place where the virtues and values we espouse as a society no longer matter. Or we end up where conspiracy stories become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you landed here through social or a colleague, please consider signing up. Have a restful and safe weekend, and I’ll see you Monday. Thanks for reading!
Big Star, “Don’t Lie to Me”
Some interesting links:
For data tracking:
The data that apps use to track you, according to Apple (Axios)
Twitter’s Working On Ways To Block Unwanted Dick Pics And Make Your DMs Safer (BuzzFeed)
For brand strategy:
We Asked: Why Does Oreo Keep Releasing New Flavors? (NYT)
For jamband fans who watch sports on Fox:
Meet the TV producer who got the NFL to jam (Sports Illustrated)
For billionaires:
Rupert Murdoch receives dose of covid-19 vaccine (The Guardian)
For buyers:
Steep Ratings Declines Create Potential Prime-Time Cash-Back Scenarios (MediaPost)
For publishers:
Content-recommendation company Taboola is repaying publishers $16 million in revenue guarantees that were postponed in the pandemic (Business Insider)