New Media Fooled Again

[John Picard]

Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote


It's funny here, how there are people here who turn a blind eye at how slanted and biased the (alleged) News Media is. I use the word "alleged" because the days of reporters and commentators researching and reporting facts are long gone.

They went to Wikipedia Just,

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.

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 Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, 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 he pointed out its true origin.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

 

[FordSVT]

It's funny here, how there are people here who turn a blind eye at how slanted and biased the (alleged) News Media is.

You so smart! We so stooopid!



Where are these great masses of media cheerleaders around here, John? Or is this just another cause of you manufacturing yourself into some kind of bullshit hero?

I believe the latter.

 

[Marc]

this is the just another in long line of the media proving just how crap is it and how research is non-existant and it's nothing new.

To given an example, a couple of years back there was story on the net that a school in the U.S had banned students failing and that even that if student failed will they'd still be passed.

The rightwing talking heads were all up in arms about - pity it turned out that to be a complete and utter fabrication - and that's one of just many example - and it seems to be the rightwing pundits who keep falling for it.

Oh and lets not forget the kid who with his dad's credit card who supposedly paid for hookers to come play on the xbox wit him.