ZDNet apologises to Yahoo for Iran post

Yesterday, “Yahoo gave Iranian authorities the names and emails of some 200,000 Iranian Yahoo users, says a post on the Iranian Students Solidarity blog,” we said in a post, quoting ZDNet’s Richard Koman.

“My sources indicate the information comes from a group of resisters who have infiltrated the administration and are leaking out important information,” said Koman, going on, “These sources say that Yahoo representatives met with Iranian Internet authorities after Google and Yahoo were shut down during the protests and agreed to provide the names of Yahoo subscribers who also have blogs in exchange for the government lifting the blocks on Yahoo.”

However, “We’re retracting the blog post,” says ZDnet editor-in-chief Larry Dignan (right), continuing » » »

Here’s what went wrong.

First, the post was based on a single source who had a clear agenda. That source wasn’t properly filtered and his charges weren’t verifiable by credible sources.

Second, we never called Yahoo to verify the report or get an appropriate response. Blog networks still need to follow journalism 101 and Yahoo should have been called. In summary, our checks and balances went awry. We put a lot of trust in our bloggers to get it right and frankly we let you down with this report.

“The chain of events can be found on the post, but we wanted to do a separate item for the record,” he says, adding :

“My apologies again and we will be taking corrective measures to prevent this breakdown.”