Fact Checking Is Vastly Over-Rated

Wikipedia....everyone has their stories about it....everyone knows that Wikipedia is a great tool as long as you make sure that you double check the "facts" that you pull from there. Well everyone it appears but those folks with the gatekeepers - the main stream media.

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.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.

"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."

Well obviously, as soon as the hoax was pointed out the media gatekeepers corrected their mistake...right???????

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.

Which just goes to show how lazy and arrogant the so-called gatekeepers have gotten. Lazy because they could not be bothered to do their own research and arrogant because when it was pointed out to them that they had been "had" that by and large they could not even admit the error. Which is one reason why the newspapers are bleeding red ink as bad as they are.