It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel
quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah
Palin did not know that 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,” Mr. 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 — the Harding Institute for
Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are
fakes.
And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by
Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for
months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in
being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los
Angeles Times.
Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help
them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why
should anyone believe a word they say?
“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a
laugh.
(For what it’s worth, another reporter for The New York Times is an
acquaintance of Mr. Gorlin and vouches for his identity, and Mr. Gorlin is
indeed “Mr. Eisenstadt” in those videos. He and his partner in deception, Dan
Mirvish, have entries on the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com. But still. ...)
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 Mr.
Mirvish, 40.
Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the
bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.
An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying
someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a
colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he
said. “It should not have made air.”
But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the
sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the
Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online
about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the
illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.
The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, who
Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish said was the original idea for a TV series.
Soon there were videos showing him driving a car while spouting offensive,
opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph
W. Giuliani. Those videos attracted tens of thousands of Internet hits and a
bit of news media attention.
When Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the presidential race, the character morphed
into Eisenstadt, a parody of a blowhard cable news commentator.
Mr. Gorlin said they chose the name because “all the neocons in the Bush
administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”
Eisenstadt became an adviser to Senator John
McCain and got a blog, updated occasionally with comments claiming insider
knowledge, and other bloggers began quoting and linking to it. It mixed
weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.
The inventors fabricated the Harding Institute, named for one of the most
scorned presidents, and made Eisenstadt a senior fellow.
It didn’t hurt that a man named Michael Eisenstadt is a real expert at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is quoted in the mainstream media.
The real Mr. Eisenstadt said in an interview that he was only dimly aware of the
fake one, and that his main concern was that people understood that “I had
nothing to do with this.”
Before long Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish had produced a short documentary on
Martin Eisenstadt, supposedly for the BBC, posted in several parts on
YouTube.
In June they produced what appeared to be an interview with Eisenstadt on
Iraqi television promoting construction of a casino in the Green Zone in
Baghdad. Then they sent out a news release in which he apologized. Outraged
Iraqi bloggers protested the casino idea.
Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for
Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s
political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to
Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.
In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack
Obama to Paris
Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at
McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others.
A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing
Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.
Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel
J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating,
the disgraced former savings
and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.
Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was
The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the
entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”
But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For
months sourcewatch.org has
identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he
blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this
thing out.”
And then there is William K. Wolfrum, a blogger who has played Javert to
Eisenstadt’s Valjean, tracking the hoaxster across cyberspace and repeatedly
debunking his claims. Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish praised his tenacity, adding
that the news media could learn something from him.
“As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to
see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist,” Mr. Wolfrum said in an
interview.
And how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?
Long pause. “Yeah, that’s a tough
one.”