A Fake Quotation: MLK And Jessica Dovey

Read Megan McArdle, Anatomy Of A Fake Quotation, at the Atlantic. She tells how the following paragraph spread throughout the Internet after the death of Osama bin Laden:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

It's a quotation from Martin Luther King -- except for the first sentence. That was written by Jessica Dovey, "a 24-year old Penn State graduate who now teaches English to middle schoolers in Kobe, Japan." She wrote the first sentence, her own quite moving thought, and followed it with King's passage -- in quotation marks.

Someone, somewhere, copied the paragraph -- but stripped out the quotation marks. The whole thing was attributed to King, andit  spread extensively.

Eventually, the mangled quotation somehow came to the attention of Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame.  He tweeted it to his 1.6 million Facebook followers, and the rest was internet history.  Twenty-four hours later, the quote brought back over 9,000 hits on Google.

The quote also went viral on Twitter, and since the 140-character limit precluded quoting the whole thing, people stripped it down to the most timely and appropriate part: the fake quote.

The speed of dissemination is breathtaking: mangled to meme in less than two days.

A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.