It seems the traditional media has scored its second victory in one week today, giving me hope that maybe blogs aren’t taking over the world after all. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to newsstands to get their Nov. 5 copies of the major newspapers, showing that humans still have an affinity for physical contact with their news. People wanted a tangible record of Obama’s historic victory, and when I went to Starbucks at 8 a.m. to get the New York Times, it was already sold out.
Now the New York Times has reported that a semi-widely quoted “McCain advisor” is a hoax. MSNBC, Wonkette, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the Huffington Post were all fooled by a filmmaker who set up a fake blog and YouTube channel. Besides commenting on Paris Hilton’s family, “Martin Eisenstadt” took responsibility for leaking Palin’s “Africa = continent?” comment. It’s still unclear what the degree of fakery is, though. Did a fake person named Eisenstadt leak fake information about Sarah Palin, or did a fake person take responsibility for potentially real information that was leaked by someone else?
Besides MSNBC, all of the fooled media outlets were blogs, not the print editions of publications. The duo behind the hoax faulted the 24-hour news cycle and shoddy reporting, not their websites, for the fakery. (Obviously it’s both. Who says 40-year-old are more mature than Millennials? “It wasn’t me, Your Honor, it was the blogs!”)
Anyway, I looked at “Eisenstadt’s” blog, and a 30-second fact check of his “credentials” would have made it pretty obvious he doesn’t exist:
Professional Experience
- Senior Fellow for Mideast Policy at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy
- Contributing editor, Near East Quarterly, 2004-2006
- Political adviser, Coalition Provisional Authority (Baghdad)
- Staff associate, Iran and Iraq, Office of the Secretary of Defense – Visiting lecturer, Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Universities of Sulaymani, Salahuddin, and Duhok (Iraqi Kurdistan), 2000-2001
- Visiting fellow, Harvard University.
- Served as a tank commander in the Army for 2 years
- Education: BA, Washington University; PhD, Bar Ilan University
The Harding Institute Website is the shadiest site I’ve ever seen, plus one phone call to the afore-mentioned institutions is all it would have taken to debunk the myth. The Near East Quarterly doesn’t seem to exist, and don’t veterans always list the units with which they served? I hesitate to use superlatives, but seriously, isn’t it an issue of pride and camraderie or something to list the unit? Anyway, it’s easy to sit here and judge, but I think this whole incident demonstrates that the traditional media’s relatively slow system exists for a reason. It shows that it takes time to get things right, and it’s worth pausing to mentally process stories before we publish them for the world to see. The only power a publication has is its integrity; is it worth risking that to be the first to blog about Paris Hilton?
Check out the New York Times article here.
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November 13, 2008 at 2:45 am
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