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Newspapers have important roles to fulfill. Are we providing readers with the accurate news reports and responsible editorials they expect? We aspire to provide readers with the best pages possible, while questioning ourselves every day about whether we are meeting this goal.
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Getting back to basics
Another key mission for newspapers is to painstakingly expose facts that have been concealed and close in on the truth.
[
Yomiuri Shimbun]
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The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's biggest daily, published a front page apology in its Oct. 13 morning edition admitting its sensational reports earlier in the week on the transplant of human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells were wrong.
The newspaper has a circulation of around 10 million.
Yomiuri had reported that Japanese researcher Hisashi Moriguchi, 48, conducted the first clinical application of iPS cells in the world.
The Oct. 11 report came three days after Japan's Shinya Yamanaka was named co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his pioneering work in stem cell research.
Along with the apology, Yomiuri printed the results of its own study into the reporting behind the initial story.
The Oct. 13 report concluded that its initial story was erroneous on grounds that a university lecturer who it had said served as co-writer of the scientific article by Moriguchi was not involved in the research. It also said that Harvard University denied the credibility of the research results that Moriguchi claimed in his article.
[
Asahi Shimbun]