US: The fake McCain political advisor
Posted by Lauren Drablier on November 13, 2008 at 2:30 PM
In the age of the Internet and blogging, news and information is spread faster than ever before. The problem is sometimes it is hard to know where the information is coming from and whether or not its even true.
Fox News, The Los Angeles Times and MSNBC were among the many who quoted a McCain campaign figure. The problem is - the man from the McCain camp was fake.
Fox News, The Los Angeles Times and MSNBC were among the many who quoted a McCain campaign figure. The problem is - the man from the McCain camp was fake.
Martin Eisenstadt was the alleged McCain policy adviser - the one who really didn't exist. He created a blog, a think tank entitled the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy and even fake YouTube clips.
Eitan Gorlin is the man behind the character of Eisenstadt - he created the fake McCain advisor as part of an elaborate hoax to help him and a colleague pitch a TV show based on the character. His most recent stunt was claiming that Sarah Palin did not know whether Africa was a country or a continent.
According to The New York Times, Gorlin believes the blame lies "not with them but with the shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially with the blogosphere." Furthermore, Gorlin argued that "Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television."
Source: New York Times
Eitan Gorlin is the man behind the character of Eisenstadt - he created the fake McCain advisor as part of an elaborate hoax to help him and a colleague pitch a TV show based on the character. His most recent stunt was claiming that Sarah Palin did not know whether Africa was a country or a continent.
According to The New York Times, Gorlin believes the blame lies "not with them but with the shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially with the blogosphere." Furthermore, Gorlin argued that "Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television."
Source: New York Times
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.editorsweblog.org%2Fmultimedia%2F2008%2F11%2Fus_the_fake_mccain_political_advisor.php&bodytext=In the age of the Internet and blogging, news and information is spread faster than ever before. The problem is sometimes it is hard to know where the information is coming from and whether or not its even true.<br /><br /><form mt:asset-id="1451" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;" contenteditable="false"><a href="http://www.editorsweblog.org/13hoax-lg.jpg"><img alt="13hoax-lg.jpg" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/13hoax-lg-thumb-190x149.jpg" class="mt-image-left" style="margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;" height="149" width="190" /></a></form><i>Fox News</i>, <i>The Los Angeles Times</i> and <i>MSNBC</i> were among the many who quoted a <b>McCain</b> campaign figure. The problem is - the man from the McCain camp was fake. <br /> <div><br /></div>&title=US: The fake <b>McCain</b> political advisor ){kind=link}
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No, please check your sources.
Fox News broke the story and quoted, as you say, "a McCain campaign figure." Fox has not retracted the story.
What turned out to be a hoax was the claim by "Martin Eisenstadt" that he was the source that Fox was quoting.
The original story has been denied by Palin but has not otherwise been called into serious question.
These two, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish are the worst kind of pondscum. They know from past experience that the media won't vet these stories. The media just runs them because of shock value. They intentially pick out an unknown in a very serious election and put out a story that could verywell affect the outcome of the election. At least what McCain and Palin said about Obama was true just no one believed it.
I don't think that kind of a spoof is very funny regardless of free speech rights or not. There should be at the very least some kind of common decency. If you can't tell the truth then keep your fu@#$%& mouth shut.
geedafotus said:
"These two, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish are the worst kind of pondscum. They know from past experience that the media won't vet these stories."
Ummm, what stories? The only claim that "Martin Eisenstadt" was the source of the Palin-Africa anecdote was Eisenstadt himself, and he is a total fraud.
Fox News continues to maintain that their source was an authentic McCain campaign insider. They stand by their story, and there is no evidence to the contrary.
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.