One of the great things about the internet is that it makes available a vast mountain of facts that previously would have been difficult to find… assuming that you even knew the fact was there to be found. But one of the bad things about the internet is that every lie is also easily available. And sadly, facts and falsehoods are all too often mistaken for one another… often unthinkingly. And thus we have mass emailings that blather on about the latest outrage that didn’t actually occur, or quaint little fairy tales transmogrifying into accepted historical events. An upside of that is that we can get some quality entertainment out of it, like Myth Busters and Snopes.com. But it’s sad that sources like that have to be created.As a result of this easy blending of fact and fiction, the professional media machine – newspapers, CNN, that sort of thing – looks down on internet sources, blogs, etc. And from a certain point of view… it’s well that they should. Let’s say that tomorrow I post a blog entry about some Amazingly Astounding Historically Important Event Here In Rural Utah. Why should I be believed? Who’s to say I’m not lying? And journalists… why, they have editors and fact checkers and are only after the truth, and not pursuing a political agenda, unlike lone cranky bloggers.
Except…
Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote
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.
In short… the kid posted a phony quote on Wikipedia, and it was rapidly picked up by those fact-checking journalists… even though Wikipedia itself quickly got rid of the quote due to the fact that it did not have proper attribution.
Keep this incident in mind the next time you read or hear something remarkable. If people would only practice a little bit more rational skepticism, we wouldn’t have to deal witheasily-debunked, yet somehow immortal conspiracy theories about the World Trade Center or Nazi flying saucers.
2 Responses to “Every fact is easily available. But so is every lie”
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No, this isn’t a good example of typical journalist fact checking and it shouldn’t be the basis to attack the media. For goodness sake, this wasn’t a story about the Iraq War, this was an obituary for film music composer Maurice Jarre.
Writing obituaries is the lowest job you can get in journalism and it is given to interns and recent college graduates. Perhaps because obituaries just really aren’t that important and it allows new journalists to learn their trade.
The editors of Wikipedia have done a really great job in that the web site has become a reliable and quotable source of information. Most of the time, the information on Wikipedia is accurate. The editors just forgot that anyone can modify the article entries.
>it shouldn’t be the basis to attack the media.
Sure. There are *far* better examples of things that can be used to attack the media (like their coverage of the tea parties, and fawning, in-the-tank coverage of Teh Won).
> this wasn’t a story about the Iraq War
Nope. And that’s one where the media has *really* fallen down on the job. For example: http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=141