Posted on 05/11/2009 12:37:15 PM PDT by JoeProBono
When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote-which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28-flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.....
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote-which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28-flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.....
The Media by-in-large are lazy. Many today have made a career out of just cut and pasting the Dem Party Line on most issues. There lack of skills shows in cases like this, even though it had nothing to do with politics of social agendas.
Right. Too many journalists are sloppy (some like Jason Blair making up quotes and witnesses, others “phoning it in” by not attending a rally but reporting on it, or like Roger Ebert admitted, reviewing a whole movie based on the first 10 minutes...).
And then with wire services syndicating stories around the globe, each idiot down the chain rewrites and translates to fit the local audience.
Too few people ever ask “did it really happen”.
The Middle East has gotten wise to this and regularly stages “news” photos for global consumption.
Sweet!
Kinda makes you trust everything the media reports about global warming (especially when they attribute it to “experts”).
So, what was the quote?
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