Bad analogy. From all indications, Fauci said what he said in good faith whereas Callimachi seems to have been desperate to confirm that her source was credible in the face of a preponderance of evidence that he was not [1]:

> The assignment, Mr. Flood recalled thinking, was both hopeless and quite strange in its specificity [...] Ms. Callimachi was singularly focused. “She only wanted things that very narrowly supported this kid in Canada’s wild stories,” he told me in a phone interview.

> Mr. Flood didn’t know it at the time, but he was part of a frantic effort at The New York Times to salvage the high-profile project the paper had just announced.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/business/media/new-york-t...