Regret the Error

The National Post, a national newspaper in Canada, has issued a full apology after a controversial story it published on page one turned out to be incorrect. The story reported that Iran was planning to force Jews and other minorities to wear Nazi-esque identifiers in public. It was splayed across the front page last Friday and accompanied by a photo from 1944 that showed two Jews wearing yellow stars on their clothing.
The original story has been removed, but you can read a summary of it here. And The Toronto Star’s Antonia Zerbisias, who has been following the story since it appeared in the Post, has some excerpts from it here. The Post’s front pager was followed by another article the next day that cast doubt on the paper’s apparent scoop, but a full apology/retraction was not issued until yesterday. The Post’s follow-up began:

Several experts are casting doubt on reports that Iran had passed a law requiring the country’s Jews and other religious minorities to wear coloured badges identifying them as non-Muslims.
The Iranian embassy in Otttawa also denied the Iranian government had passed such a law.
A news story and column by Iranian-born analyst Amir Taheri in yesterday’s National Post reported that the Iranian parliament had
passed a sweeping new law this week outlining proper dress for Iran’s majority Muslims, including an order for Jews, Christians and
Zoroastrians to wear special strips of cloth.
According to the reports, Jews were to wear yellow cloth strips, called zonnar, while Christians were to wear red and Zoroastrians blue.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center and Iranian expatriates living in Canada had confirmed the order had been passed, although it still had to be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect.
Hormoz Ghahremani, a spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, said in an e-mail to the Post yesterday, “We wish to categorically reject the news item.
“These kinds of slanderous accusations are part of a smear campaign against Iran by vested interests, which needs to be denounced at every step.”

The follow-up naturally led folks to wonder why the Post didn’t do this kind of legwork before to publishing the piece. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Douglas Kelly, published an apology and explanation yesterday on page 2 under the headline, “Our mistake: Note to readers.” The online version is behind a paywall, which is unacceptable. Here are the core bits:

The story of the alleged badge law first came to us in the form of a column by Amir Taheri. Mr. Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist,
has written widely on Iran for many major publications. In his column, Mr. Taheri wrote at length about the new law, the main purpose of which is to establish an appropriate dress code for Muslims. Mr. Taheri went on to say that under the law, “Religious minorities would have their own colour schemes. They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faith.”
This extraordinary allegation caught our attention, of course. The idea that Iran might impose such a law did not seem out of the question given that its President has denied the Holocaust and threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” We tried to contact Mr. Taheri, but he was in transit and unreachable.
The editor who was dealing with Mr. Taheri’s column wrote to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles…Rabbi Cooper replied by e-mail that the story was “absolutely true.”
…The reporter also spoke with two Iranian exiles in Canada — Ali Behroozian in Toronto and Shahram Golestaneh in Ottawa. Both said that they had heard the the story of the badges from their contacts in Iran and they believed it to be true.
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department did not respond to questions about the issue until after deadline, and then only to say they were looking into the matter. After several calls to the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, the reporter reached Hormoz Ghahremani, a spokesman for the embassy.
Mr. Ghahremani’s response to the allegation was that he did not answer such questions.
We now had four sources — Mr. Taheri, the Wiesenthal Center and two Iranian exiles in Canada — telling us that according to their sources the Iranian law appeared to include provisions for compelling religious minorities to identify themselves in public. Iranian authorities in Canada had not denied the story. Given the sources, and given the previous statements of the Iranian President, we felt confident the story was true and decided to publish it.
The reaction was immediate and distressing. Several experts whom the reporter had tried unsuccessfully to contact the day before called to say the story was not true. The Iranian embassy put out a statement late in the day doing what it had failed to do the day before — unequivocally deny such a law had been passed.
…Mr. Taheri, who had written the column that sparked the story, was again unreachable on Friday. He has since put out a statement saying the National Post and others “jumped the gun” in our characterization of his column…Mr. Taheri maintains the zonnar, or badges, could still be put in effect when the dress code law is implemented.
…We acknowledge that on this story, we did not exercise sufficient caution and skepticism, and we did not check with enough sources. We should have pushed the sources we did have for more corroboration of the information they were giving us. That is not to say that we ignored basic journalistic practices or that we rushed this story into print with no thought as to the consequences. But given the seriousness of the allegations, more was required.
We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story. We take this incident very seriously, and we are examining our procedures to try to ensure such an error does not happen again.

Lots of coverage (link is now dead) on this.