The Ethical Optimist

My buddy Darryl Salerno sent me a great story recently, which highlights the credibility (or lack thereof) of media. Here’s a quick lift from the AP story:

DUBLIN (AP) — 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.

The story highlights a problem many public relations professionals now face, which is the lack of original source reporting. With ongoing consolidation and the downsizing of newsrooms, newspapers steal from wires, television steals from newspapers, and local media steal from national outlets and the web. So, if the original source makes a mistake– like taking a quote out of context or inaccurately posting a corporations financial results — it can be a nightmare to set the record straight.

The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that fact checking has gone the way of the dinosaur. I haven’t received a fact checking call in almost five years now, and early in my career they were routine.

It also makes me a very wary consumer. If a news report causes me concern, I now go to the trouble of trying to do a bit of research before forming my opinion. I no longer trust the media, which is sad because I always considered it an institution that brought balance to a democratic discussion.

“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.

‘Nuff said.