Ah, all those layers of Editors and Fact-Checkers

Seems they rely on Wikipedia:

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.

It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.

...

However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin.

This isn't they run-of-the-mill biased media story. Rather, it's a glaring example of how the media brand is devalued in a way that reinforces the bias perception. It works like this:

Step 1. The media gets snookered, and publishes something that's clearly not true.

Step 2. Public realized that what the media published was bogus. Lousy made-up Wikipedia quote, Internet porn peddled by anti-war activists instead of actual news, whatever. Public realizes this because they get the real story from Al Gore's Intarwebz.

Step 3. The media tells public you can't trust the Internet; you can trust us because we have layers of Editors and Fact checkers - just look at our "Corrections" section, where we publish dozens of trivial corrections!

Step 4. Media goes out of business.

I'd point out that they're damaging the brand, but that ship has sailed.

Hat tip: Slashdot, where - as usual - the comments deliver:

Check facts (Y/N):> Y

Option not available. Please try another option.

Check facts (Y/N):> N

Publish article (Y/N):> Y

UPDATE 7 May 2009 11:53: To Old To Work, Too Young To Retire (correctly) points out an example of the media publishing grotesquely false hit pieces. I didn't bother citing examples, which are legion. Interested readers can find many examples here.