NEW YORK – MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday.
David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent.
Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
The Eisenstadt claim had mistakenly been delivered to Shuster by a producer and was used in a political discussion Monday afternoon, MSNBC said.
The reason that MSDNC was so eager to report this story that they ran with it without doing any basic fact checking was that it added credence to an anti-Palin story. The fact that the source for the Palin smears is anonymous put them in doubt from the beginning and the fact that CNN (of all things) investigated them and found them to be false drives the stake through their heart.
Unless a source, placed highly enough in the campaign to know, comes forward on the record to repeat them.
The ultra-left cable channel thought they had that and so they didn't want to know that they might be false. Any more than Dan Rather wanted to know that the National Guard documents that implicated George W Bush were forgeries.
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