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Wan LixinOpinion deputy editor of Shanghai Daily
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Hoax quote spots flaws in media coverage
Source: Agencies |
May 13, 2009, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHEN Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said 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 made-up quote - which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death on March 28 - flew straight on to dozens of United States blogs and newspaper Websites in Britain, Australia and India.
They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said on Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian in the UK, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version - or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after Fitzgerald pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote reads. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's made-up quote - which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death on March 28 - flew straight on to dozens of United States blogs and newspaper Websites in Britain, Australia and India.
They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said on Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian in the UK, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version - or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after Fitzgerald pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote reads. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
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