Proof Journalists No Longer Try

An Irish student hoaxes lazy journalists around the world and proves what conservatives have been saying for years...

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.

I'm actually shocked that The Guardian is the only one to step up to the Honesty Plate since some years ago they bought faked and stolen documents from Greenpeace that one of my husband's co-workers had planted in his trash to prove Greenpeace wasn't behaving so nice.

But hey, if even one newpaper has learned its lesson, that's a good thing, right?