Posted by
J. A. Colon on Monday, December 01, 2008 12:48:55 AM
Seventeen days ago, the New York times published a piece by Richard Perez Pena that showed how dumb our media really is, and how little attention we pay, as a Nation, to real news. In my opinion, the implications are staggering. The title of the piece is “A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence”.
The story is about Martin Eisenstadt, the McCain advisor who was the source of the rumors about Sara Palin not knowing that Africa was a continent, and a slew of other “fictional rumors“. Like Rush Limbaugh likes to say, a false rumor, to be effective, needs a hint of truth in it. Mr. Eisenstadt is a Fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. The institute, I was told, has a website. There are YouTube videos of him posted in the website. “The New Republic”, MSNBC, the L.A. Times, etc are among the many news media who quotes Mr. Eisenstadt.
There are videos on the web of Mr. Eisenstadt driving a car and spewing offensive opinions supporting Rudy Giuliani. Some of these videos even made the news.
After Rudi dropped out of the race, the subject of this article started a blog, claiming to have insider’s information. How could he not, being a McCain adviser? Later on, a short mini documentary for the BBC showed up on the web. He even broke the story of the idea to open a casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Iraqi Bloggers promptly protested the idea.
Eisenstadt kept abreast of the political discourse stating that when the ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton was aired, “the phones were ringing off the hook”.
Not even Joe Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was safe from Eisenstadt’s rumors. Joe found himself being linked to Charles Keating, of the savings and loans scandal.
Jeremy Gaines, a spokesperson for MSNBC, stated that a staffer for the news organization received the piece via email, about Governor Palin and Africa, and ran with it right away. And many other bloggers and news agencies have posted in what appears to be the obituary page retractions indicating that “Martin Eisenstadt” was and indeed is, a hoax.
WHAT? That all of these rumors are not true? How Can it be?
Simple. Two guys wanted to pitch an idea for a TV show based on a Washington insider. So, since according to the NYT most of President Bush’s Cabinet and advisers have Christians names and Jewish last names, they concocted the name “Martin Eisenstadt”, recorded several YouTube videos, created a website and a blog, and a new Washington insider was born.
A blogger by the name of William Wolfrum tracked Eisenstadt all over cyber space debunking each and every one of Eisenstadt rumors, to the point that the hoaxers who created this fictional character praise his persistence, and stated that the Main Stream Media should learn a thing or two of this blogger’s tenacity. If the media would have done their jobs, they would have found two wannabe film makers by the name of Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish who concocted this elaborated hoax.
Now, I waited seventeen days before writing this post, since I was hoping that our professional alternative media would jump to it and at least mention it to attempt to restore Governor Palin’s credibility. I was hoping that O’Reilly, who dedicated a fairly long segment to cover the news of Palin not knowing that Africa was a continent, and that she was pretty much a dummy that did not know the workings of the State Government. To his defense, O’Reilly did say that those rumors were ludicrous, but the guy who was reporting the “facts” was adamant that these “facts” came from a McCain advisor.
Different media outlets did issued retractions, but those retractions have not been covered by the news media, nor alternative media. So, I guess is up to us bloggers yet again to make sure that this information is properly disseminated.
Let’s keep the pressure on, and continue to expose the hoaxes and media bias.