World media punk'd by Irish student

I've been a frequent critic of the mainstream media from many angles, often pointing out that the common 'liberal media' epithet fails to see the forest for the trees. One of my biggest objections is that modern journalism is lazy. Specifically the new media's insistence on squeezing nearly every story into a simplistic dichotomy (establishment liberal v establishment conservative) rather than doing the work that would produce a more layered and more accurate narrative. And their overreliance on polls, predictions and analysis as a substitute for, rather than a compliment to, real journalism.

The perils of this laziness was recently illustrated when an experiment by a university student from Dublin embarrassed some of the world's most respected media outlets.

Irish student Shane Fitzgerald posted a charismatic, but fabricated, quote on the Wikipedia page of a French composer, shortly the musician's death.

The AP reported that the quote 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.

Many news outlets quietly expunged the incorrect information. The UK daily The Guardian was the only one to publicly admit their mistake.

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.

[...]

Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.

He noted that several news outlets blamed him for their own laziness.