By Richard Perez-Pena
It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying Sarah Palin did not know Africa was a continent.
Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. "Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks," Shuster said.
Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn't exist. His blog does, but it's a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow is just a website. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.
And the claim of credit for the anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt in a hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by Eisenstadt, including The New Republic and the Los Angeles Times.
Now a pair of filmmakers, Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin, say they created Martin Eisenstadt.
They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere. "With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find," said Mirvish, 40. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the internet or television.
The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, which Gorlin and Mirvish said they created to help pitch a TV series based on the character. During his short digital life, Eisenstadt morphed from politically opinionated parking guy to a parody of a cable news commentator to an adviser to John McCain. He got a blog, updated with comments claiming insider knowledge, and other bloggers began linking to it.
In July, after the McCain campaign compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said "the phone was burning off the hook" at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Hilton's grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name.
Among those taken in by the Palin Africa report was The New Republic's political blog. Later the magazine apologised.
The Huffington Post website was onto the ruse earlier this week, but told its readers that while Eisenstadt was a fake, Mrs Palin's geography could still be suspect: "None of this means the Africa story is false just that it didn't come from this source."
The New York Times