By now you've heard of Martin Eisenstadt, the hoax who claimed to be a John McCain policy adviser and planted such brilliant nuggets such as "Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country," but was actually an elaborate ruse cooked up by two filmmakers hoping to pitch a television show. Eisenstadt, played for TV cameras by a one Eitan Gorlin, even got Palin to respond to the allegations and rebutt them.
If Eisenstadt didn't dupe you, you're in the minority. Jossip fell for the ploy, as did MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the New Republic, among others.
But Fox News says it had different "anonymous sources" on the Palin/Africa story. In fact, when Jossip on Friday published an item calling Fox News (and Greta van Susteren especially) "sympathetic" to McCain-Palin, an irate Irena Briganti (she of FNC's PR squad) emailed us to argue that Fox couldn't be sympathetic to Palin when when they "broke the story" about Plain know knowing Africa was continent. She added: "This makes you guys look seriously ill-informed……" And in a follow-up email, Briganti told us, "If we were so 'sympathetic' to Palin, we would have ignored a story which has severely embarrassed her…." So, Africa still is a country, and Jossip still is ill-informed. Got it!
But what's the moral of the story here? Blogs get a lot of shit for not "vetting stories," "fact checking," or even "reporting." Well guess what? Mainstream news media don't do that either. (MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines told the Times the story "had not been vetted … It should not have made air.") We all get emails from people claiming certain relationships to the McCain or Obama campaigns, and generally, they turn out to be the real deal. But Eisenstadt's prank — one we'll go so far as to call brilliant — shows that simply repeating the allegations in an unsolicited email, even if it's from somebody at the (fake) "Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy," is also not "reporting." Especially when sites like SourceWatch.org are out there, which already identified Eisenstadt as a hoax.
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What disgusted me about the liberal media's response to Palin (and I say this as a liberal life long democrat) is that the democratic party is supposed to be the party of compassion and understanding and recognition that people are entitled to express the full range of belief along the political spectrum.
But when it came to Palin everyone acted like animals. And the blogs are continuing to pump out more hate on Palin daily.
It really changed my whole perspective of the media and the democrats and made me more conservative in the process.
Palin never tried shoving her views down anyone else's throat. She showed a lot of dignity compared to her liberal counterparts.
What is more disturbing is that the media is still constantly attacking Palin 9 days after the election. There has been some BullSh1t story about her every day and yet I have not seen ANYTHING about the new idiot VP Joe (I can’t remember history) Biden. It is most likely the dumocrates making these stories up and the MSM gleefully reporting anything that spews their A$$. The MSM is destroying this country and it appears that 1/2 of America either doesn’t care or is too stupid to understand what is going on.
@ Bob is Salem NH
"It is most likely the dumocrates making these stories up and the MSM gleefully reporting anything that spews their A$$. The MSM is destroying this country and it appears that 1/2 of America either doesn’t care or is too stupid to understand what is going on."
What part of the Fox News we "broke the story" statement didn't you comprehend?
I first heard of this story via a Bill O'Reilly video clip on the Fox News site. Sheeesh!
Seems to me that the people calling this a case of liberal media bias are way off the mark. It's more likely a symptom of media of all stripes just going too fast to do a decent job of reporting. More on that here:
http://notimetothinkbook.com/?p=120
I'm not hear to rant on Sarah Palin, but to let you know that the above article is a little misleading. Here's what the MSNBC article said:
"The hoax was limited to the identity of the source in the story about Palin - not the Fox News story itself. While Palin has denied that she mistook Africa for a country, the veracity of that report was not put in question by the revelation that Eisenstadt is a phony."
So the only thing that was a hoax was a McCain campaign advisor, who doesn't exist, saying he was the source of the leak.
The leak and the story itself are NOT a hoax.
Again, the story about Sarah Palin not knowing Africa was a continent is NOT a hoax.
A fake McCain campaign advisor admitting he was the source of the story WAS a hoax.
No no no no no. It was not a hoax. The above article is misleading. Here's a snippet from the article at MSNBC.
"The hoax was limited to the identity of the source in the story about Palin - not the Fox News story itself. While Palin has denied that she mistook Africa for a country, the veracity of that report was not put in question by the revelation that Eisenstadt is a phony."
So the only thing that was a hoax was a McCain campaign advisor, who doesn't exist, saying he was the source of the leak.
The leak and the story itself are NOT a hoax.
Again, the story about Sarah Palin not knowing Africa was a continent is NOT a hoax.
A fake McCain campaign advisor admitting he was the source of the story WAS a hoax.
oops. Sorry for the double post.
Good advice that no one will take.
Those pitiful people that start rumors and keep ragging about Sarah Palin need to get a life of their own. Then others could rag on them. Right now they are so inconsequential they rag on others seeking to be noticed.
Alzy
Ha ha! Martin Eisenstadt pwned the news media! A simple Google search would have shown that the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy is fake. Everyone knows that the dinosaur news media will never change. This isn't the first hoax that the news media fell for due its lack of any kind of research and this won't be the last hoax. The dinosaur news media is just going to keep getting pwned by people like Martin until no one can trust their reporting anymore and they go extinct.
@tony the tiger: Thank you. I totally agree. There are so many Democrats claiming to take the high road and to be fair. Look what Al Franken is doing in Minnesota. When the ballots were initially counted Franken lost by 725 votes. Now every new vote that has been found practically is for Franken? I don't think so. I smell voter fraud. Which party is more trustworthy?
And what about fair coverage of the election by the media? It just didn't exist. Was anything negative covered about Obama? Look at the garbage that Dan Rather manufactured about Bush right before the 2004 election.