Who can you trust?

I am fascinated by how easy it is to research a term paper today. I wonder how many students bother to open a book nowadays. Everything is available online.

There is so much information out there that one needs to exercise caution when it comes to researching that dreaded assignment. When I was younger, one former teacher would not accept encyclopedias as a source because the information found there was so general. When I got older, another teacher told me to not use Wikipedia because the information could not be verified all the time.

The teacher who warned me of Wikipedia and its questionable reliability got some vindication today when Yahoo! News reported an Irish university student had posted phony information on Wikipedia ("Irish student hoaxes world media with fake quote" can be read at http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Irish-student-hoaxes-worlds-apf-15201451.html?.v=1). Shane Fitzgerald, a 22-year-old sociology student, saw news of the passing of French composer Maurice Jarre. Jarre had passed away on March 28.

Fitzgerald said there was a discussion in one of his classes about how fast news tends to travel through all of the outlets today. This gave him an idea: Fitzgerald would fabricate a quote, attribute it to the late Jarre, and post it on Wikipedia. To their credit, people at the free web encyclopedia removed the quote twice but not before Web sites in three different countries included it in the composer's obituary. The only reason people knew of the mistake is because Fitzgerald finally stepped forward about the act. Since then, Yahoo! News has reported that just one media outlet, the Guardian of Britain, has admitted it erroneously included the quote.

It is easy today to find out the news. Around-the-clock coverage on radio, television, and the Internet gives the people access to information the want and need. Unfortunately, whether it's right can sometimes take a backseat to getting it first. Just ask the Guardian.

I have a blog but that does not make me a journalist. I will be the first to tell you that. However, I have been published before in news publications. Because of that, I consider myself to be a journalist. It's one thing to get something wrong. It's another thing altogether to run with something without verifying it. There is simply too much competition out there to report on something without verifying it first. Getting it right will give you much more credibility than simply trying to get a story first.

The Guardian has since admitted the folly and even contacted Fitzgerald since the error. Other outlets, according to Yahoo!, have attacked the man for posting the information in the first place.
This is not the first time such a thing has occurred. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, a quote attributed to Nostradamus surfaced and soon received notoriety. The quote mentioned "metal birds" crashing and tragedy striking. News of the quote spread but soon ceased when it was learned the quote came from a prankster and not from the renowned author.

Journalists have a responsibility to make sure the information the have is right. People have a responsibility to take information with a grain of salt. Giving people what is right will be doing them a better service no matter what they are reading.