"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."The above is a tender and moving sentiment from Maurice Jarre (photo at right), the brilliant and award-winning composer (Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India) who died on March 29th.
Well, at least it's a compelling quotation attributed to him by dozens of newspapers and web sites.
The problem? Maurice Jarre never said it.
No, the sweet paragraph came, in fact, from Shane Fitzgerald, a young Irish prankster who was conducting an experiment in media inaccuracy. Fitzgerald's joke, only discovered because he himself came forward, tells us a great deal about the media's irresponsible dependence on Wikipedia and other sources.
"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," [Fitzgerald] said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
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.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
