JapanWhen the Guardian posted a “news article” earlier this year headlined “Eyeball-licking: the fetish that is making Japanese teenagers sick,” all hell broke loose. That’s because the “story” was a hoax, and the Guardian, along with a number of news-gathering outlets, did not do the proper fact-checking that such stories warrant.

But thanks to the Tokyo-based American journalist Mark Schreiber—he’s been writing, reporting and translating in Japan since 1965—the fake story has been debunked, and the Guardian has since apologized and taken the article down.

Case closed? Not really, because this kind of thing happens a lot in the digital age, where fact-checkers are few and far between, and where exotic overseas stories that sound too good to be true are often, well … too good to be true. But with social media and other platforms, these fake stories go viral, and some editors refuse to take them down even when they learn the actual “facts” of the case.

JapanIn the Guardian‘s case, the editors backed down after they heard from Schreiber, who wrote to the Guardian‘s Reader Services Department; the paper not only apologized, but also took the story down immediately.

According to the story, there was something called “oculolinctus, an eye-licking fetish that [was] currently sweeping across the schools of Japan like, well, like a great big dirty bacteria-coated tongue sweeping across a horrific number of adolescent eyeballs … oculolinctus is being blamed for a significant rise in Japanese cases of conjunctivitis and eye-chlamydia … It’s apparently seen as a new second-base; the thing you graduate to when kissing gets boring.”

As you can probably guess, the story was indeed all over the Web. Did you see it? I didn’t hear of this until Schreiber, who I’ve known for 20 years, sent me an email about all this last week.

Long story short: Schreiber said he “contacted three Japanese professional organizations, including two ophthalmological associations and an organization of school clinicians.”

They told him no such trend existed.

So Schreiber wrote a column for Number 1 Shimbun, the monthly magazine of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

In the article, he wrote:

“Debunking an anonymous, unattributed story may be impossible, but it was not especially difficult to at least cast doubts on the sweeping claim that large numbers of Japanese adolescents were suffering from an epidemic of tongue-induced pink eye, as the blogs were now claiming.

“Convinced at this point that the story was based on a hoax, I fired off emails to editors who saw fit to run the story, at Raw Story, the SF Chronicle, the Syracuse Post-Standard, Shanghailist and several others.

“A few responded. None of them were prompted to remove the story from their site. ‘We didn’t write the story, dude. It’s a syndicated story,’ was how Raw Story’s editor responded, advising me that if it was good enough for the Guardian, it was good enough for her.”

Schreiber then wrote to the Guardian‘s readers editor to explain that Raw Story had refused to take the story down because the esteemed Guardian had not. Oops! Following the leader in the digital age can easily lead to embarrassment, or worse.

Schreiber concluded his Shimbun piece by quoting a Japan-based UK correspondent who said he couldn’t imagine that “journalists who write blogs, contribute as freelancers, etc, are held to different editorial standards than staff and other full-time writers.” Schreiber went on: “Tracking this story from its source to its audience has convinced me otherwise.”

Stuart Heritage, the journalist who wrote the Guardian story, confessed later that he had relied on Tumblr postings and YouTube videos when reporting the eyeball-licking ”trend.”

Readers beware!

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  1. “Raw Story” says on its website right now in Internet Time that they are aware of the Guardian story was fake and that Schreiber debunked the story well, and that they will take down the story from the Raw Story website but only after the Guardian writes to them and informs them so the story is still UP at Raw Story. i sent a tweet to Roxanne Cooper the editor at RS to let her know the story has been taken down by the Guardian which she said she would do once she was aware of that event. Let’s see how long it take for RC to do what she promised.

  2. UPDATE 8/25/13: ”In a strongly-worded piece, The Guardian’s Readers Editor repudiated the facts in this syndicated piece and said it would be taken offline by the newspaper. Raw Story awaits official notice from the paper and then remove it as well. ”

  3. How the fake story was debunked.

    First, Schreiber wrote to the Guardian’s omsbudsman and told him it was phony. Then he wrote an expose piece for the No. 1 Shimbun of the FCCJ in Tokyo.
    After the Shimbun story appeared, snopes.com pronounced the story as FALSE

    http://www.snopes.com/media/goofs/eyeballlicking.asp

    After that the word started spreading and other people started writing to the Guardian about it. They finally caved in.

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