Reporter at Japan daily fabricated source's comment about Kobayashi Pharma

OSAKA -- A reporter fabricated a source's comment regarding the ingredients in Kobayashi Pharmaceutical Co.'s "beni-koji" red yeast rice supplements, following a series of health hazard reports related to the supplements, a newspaper company here revealed on April 17.

The 48-year-old City News Department reporter at the Osaka headquarters of The Yomiuri Shimbun, which is based in Tokyo, apparently admitted to fabricating the comment because the tone of the article was different from what they had imagined.

According to the company, the article with the fabricated comment was printed in the paper's April 6 evening edition. The article quoted the president of a company in Okayama Prefecture which had business with Kobayashi Pharmaceutical, reading, "We have not received clear information from Kobayashi Pharmaceutical. I want the company to provide an explanation soon."

In reality, however, the president didn't make that comment. A 53-year-old Okayama Bureau reporter who interviewed the president apparently said that they "wanted to make the article sound aligned with what the City News Department wanted," and didn't ask the head office to fix the comment.

While The Yomiuri Shimbun printed a correction in the April 8 evening edition, it only said, "We did not confirm the facts sufficiently," without mentioning that the president didn't make any such comment.

The daily newspaper plans to take strict disciplinary action against the reporters involved. The company commented, "The correction was also problematic. We will further educate our reporters and work to prevent a recurrence."

(Japanese original by Hirofumi Nohara, Osaka City News Department)