Martin Eisenstadt, senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, the hoax MSM swallowed whole.

Here's the NYT report. Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish -- we're told they are real -- have a TV show with a fictional character named Martin Eisenstadt and they set up a blog "written" by him to promote the show. Why did MSNBC, TNR, and the L.A. Times treat him as a real person, an insider to the McCain campaign, and quote his Sarah Palin insults?

“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.”

Oh, it arrived in the email....

How embarrassingly lame.

The NYT makes a point of saying that "most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers." How meaningless is that? There are millions of bloggers, at all levels of competence and seriousness. You can't compare bloggers to MSM in numerical terms! The shame here is on MSM. And let me add that I never fell for the Eisenstadt story. I rejected the Africa-is-a-country insult as implausible on its face.