Serial - A Critique of the Urick Interview (makes more sense if you read the interview)

“Sorry I cant [sic] be your sarah bruh,” Natasha Vargas-Cooper tweeted in response to criticism of part 1 of the Intercept’s exclusive interview with prosecutor Kevin Urick, authored by Vargas-Cooper and Ken Silverstein. 

By this, she means, Sarah Koenig, creator of the wildly popular “Serial” podcast, presented a biased view of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Hae Min Lee in 1999 that unfairly manipulated the audience to by [be] sympathetic to Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the murder of Ms. Lee.  The staff behind Serial disagree, stating that they are “committed to reporting that’s comprehensive, fair, and exhaustively fact-checked.”  Reddit may disagree that Koenig and the Serial staff presented a biased story.  Critics of the Intercept’s Urick interview may disagree.

But Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein, who prefaced their interview with a scathing criticism of Serial, remain certain that there were “no significant errors or changes” in their article. 

This week, Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein published an interview with prosecutor Kevin Urick in the hopes of finding a miscarriage of journalistic integrity.  The result was the January 7th article with a scathing introduction rebuking Koenig and the Serial staff.

The disproportionate amount of outrage sparked by the article can be explained, in part, by the sharp contrast in the journalistic practices displayed by the Intercept .  The Intercept presented an archetype of the biased reporting story:  the accused is charming and charismatic, the journalist fails to contact key players of the story, and the readers are manipulated by a well-crafted story designed to sway their sympathies.  All these problems, sadly, occur often in journalism, but there’s no indication they impacted this story.

The basic facts are simple.  Sarah Koenig was contacted by Rabia Chaudry, a family friend of Syed, about the case in late 2013.  Koenig was intrigued by the case and her and the rest of the Serial staff conducted a year-long investigation into the case, reviewing evidence, transcripts, and notes, and attempting to contact numerous individuals who were associated with the case.  The centerpiece of Koenig’s efforts were regular conversations with Syed himself, who is currently an inmate at the North Branch Correctional Institution.

Koenig presented the result of her investigation in a 12-part podcast titled “Serial,” which concluded on December 18, 2014.  She was unable to find any “silver bullet” exonerating Syed, but stated her opinion that while she could not be certain Syed was innocent, she would have voted to acquit if she had been on the jury.

The Intercept portrayed Serial as a combination of biased reporting and manipulative storytelling designed to captivate an audience.  This viewpoint infused the scathing introduction to the Urick interview.  While Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein never explicitly accused Koenig of bias, they insisted that there was an ulterior motive behind the presentation of the story.  “The storytelling device was to amplify claims that favored Syed’s defense and contrast that with a watered-down version of the state’s case,” Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein wrote in their article.

When a community of thousands of people come back with support for Koenig’s attempt to present a balanced view of the facts, you’d think that attacking Koenig’s integrity would require some evidence.  Yet Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein did not produce evidence, and mostly presented contested proclamations by Jay Wilds (the state’s key witness) and Kevin Urick as truth without thoroughly fact-checking their assertions, such as publishing doctored screenshots of online conversations provided by Wilds, claims that a witness pled the 5th Amendment in front of the grand jury out of fear of incriminating himself, and allegations that Koenig only attempted to contact Urick less than a week before the podcast concluded.

None of these charges have survived scrutiny.  That was demonstrated by information made available after the Intercept published these claims.  The screenshot provided by Wilds was proven to have been altered when the person Wilds was communicating with brought this to Vargas-Cooper’s attention and then posted on reddit when no action had been taken (the screenshot has since been removed from the Wilds interview – without a correction from the Intercept).  Chaudry posted notes showing that the witness in question did in fact testify before the grand jury, proving Wilds’ claim that the witness had pled the 5th Amendment to be erroneous (despite the Intercept having fact checked this with two sources).  And the Serial staff posted their full response  to the Intercept’s allegations regarding attempts to contact Urick by posting the full text of their statement to the Intercept on the issue, outlining the attempts made to contact Urick for the podcast.  Nevertheless, Silverstein maintains that alleged factual inaccuracies are “smoke and mirrors.” 

The reality is that the Intercept’s interviews could maximize the benefit of the popularity of the podcast if they could express a controversial and contrarian view criticizing the efforts of Koenig and the Serial staff.  If Koenig had done her due diligence, there would be no attention.  The strategy wasto criticize Koenig’s failure to get the story from important figures from the case while luring these individuals with softball interviews that allowed them to present their narratives unchallenged.  There is supposed to be a presumption that additional information will enrich the discussion.  But when the information provided are self-serving statements that are unreliable, there is no added value.

Yesterday, Silverstein tweeted, “Having a viewpoint is whatfearless, adversarial journalism is about. At least that’s what I thought.”  This was in response to Intercept Co-Founding Editor Glenn Greenwald’s presentation of the article as having Vargas-Cooper’s and SIlverstein’s “own view & critique of ‘Serial.’”

 

Had the authors accepted the audience’s conclusion – that Koenig had diligently investigated the case – there would be no controversy, no general interest in the tepid statements Urick provided, and hence no buzz.  So the authors dismissed the decision of the millions of people who heard the podcast, and even though they found nothing that supported their claims of biased reporting, shifted the burden onto Koenig and Serial to defend their process over the course of the investigation.

The most troubling part of the Intercept’s attack is the staff’s underwhelming efforts to provide even rudimentary support for their accusations.  They stated that Urick contended that Koenig “only emailed him on Dec. 12, less than a week before the podcast concluded, to ask about an allegation that he had badgered a witness against Syed for not making the defendant look ‘creepy’ enough.”  Yet the following paragraph provides an abbreviated version of a response from Serial’s executive producer Julie Snyder stating that they “reached out to Kevin Urick multiple times, at multiple locations, during the winter of 2014, about nine months before the podcast began airing.”  But the authors dismissed out-of-hand Snyder’s account and credited Urick’s protestation that “the first time he heard from Koenig was in that mid-December email.”  At best this is a factual dispute that is contested.  If the Serial staff had reached out to Urick on multiple occasions, there is simply no basis for the Intercept’s criticism of Koenig’s underwhelming efforts to speak with Urick.  

[EDIT:  The Intercept issued a correction to the article with some edits, one of which added to a quote from Urick stating "They may have left a voicemail that I didn't return but I am not sure of that."  The accompanying editor's note stated:  "In the editing process, Urick's quote was shortened.  When provided originally with Urick's full statement, 'Serial' producer Julie Snyder declined to respond beyond her original comments.  'Serial' now, via Twitter, says, 'Koenig left numerous messages for Urick, starting last winter and into the spring, many months before the podcast started airing.'"  

It's unclear under what circumstances Urick's quote would have been "shortened" to omit the very statement that supports Serial's version of what transpired -- that the Serial staff "may have left a voicemail that [he] didn't return."  If Urick had actually said this, editing this statement out from the quote is a bad faith attempt to distort the facts to further the Intercept's narrative.  If this is some clumsy post hoc attempt at damage control by Urick, it is disingenuous to claim this was omitted from the original quote.  In either case, this is just another example of sloppiness from the Intercept.]

Urick didn’t have any new facts to tell Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein – just as he would not have had told to Koenig and Serial, especially since Urick said he “did not and would not have agreed to be interviewed by Koenig.”  But his wildly contradictory and self-serving interview where he parroted the mantra that the cell phone records and Jay’s testimony corroborated each other, despite the fact that the one key product of the Serial podcast was a systematic dismantling of the State’s timetable and Jay’s testimony, explains why the Intercept article is an attempt to create controversy and cash in on the attention generated by the podcast. 

Urick acknowledged that Wilds had told conflicting versions of events, but contended that the defense was only able to challenge “collateral facts,” and not “material facts” directly related to the question of Syed’s guilt or innocence.  But the article failed to press Urick’s assertion and question why issues such as (1) when an alleged phone call from Syed to Wilds establishing the time of death occurred, (2) when and where Syed allegedly showed Wilds the victim’s body, directly tying Syed to the murder, and (3) when Syed and Wilds allegedly buried the victim’s body (when cell phone calls purporting to place Syed at the burial location at 7:09 pm and 7:16pm) were merely “collateral” facts. [EDIT:  Susan Simpson's latest blog post notes that the call logs AT&T sent to the police included a section labeled "How to read 'Subscriber Activity' Reports" which states, "Outgoing calls only are reliable for location status.  Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location." (emphasis in original).  This document calls into question the validity of Urick's contention that the call logs definitively show Syed was at Leakin Park at that time.]

The focus on distinguishing collateral and material facts misses a larger point.  In investigations, there is the danger of confirmation bias where good facts confirming your theory tend to be embraced, whereas negative facts that contradict your theory tend to be diminished.  Without direct evidence that cannot be manipulated, the circumstantial evidence that is available can be interpreted and spun to the narrative you want to tell.   The evidence did not tell us the story of what happened on January 13, 1999; Jay Wilds’ testimony did. 

And those same cellphone records that Urick contends corroborated Wild’s testimony about the crime in fact contradict Jay’s narrative during several large swaths of the day.  The problem was further exacerbated by Wild’s interview with the Intercept where he told a brand new story of what occurred on that fateful day, which contradicts his sworn testimony and cannot be reconciled with the phone records. 

The authors did not ask Urick the hard questions probing at the credibility of Wild’s testimony as corroboration for the cell phone evidence.  Specifically, Urick was not asked how the State’s theory that the cell phone records demonstrate that Hae Min Lee was murdered before 2:36pm (at which Syed called Wilds) could be reconciled with accounts that both Syed and Lee were seen alive between 2:30pm and 3:00pm or that Wilds himself testified at trial that he did not hear from Syed until after 3:30pm. 

There are stories that are thoroughly researched and make an attempt to support controversial claims that change the prevailing thought.  This was not one of them.