Eitan Gorlin Knows That Africa Is A Continent And That We’re Not Really Journalists

Eitan Gorlin is something of a renaissance man. He has been key grip for such celluloid gems as 2007’s Lez Be Friends in addition to working as a writer, producer and electrician. He also happens to be a senior fellow at a fake think tank — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — as “Martin Eisenstadt.” It’s this fakeperson, Eisenstadt, who claimed to have leaked the news that Governor Sarah Palin did not know that Africa happens to be a continent. MSNBC anchor David Shuster read about the fakeconfession on fakeperson Eisenstadt’s realblog and decided to go ahead and report it:

And now he looks kind of stupid. Which may have been realperson Eitan Gorlin’s intent all along. Gorlin and a collaborator, Dan Mirvish, created Martin Eisenstadt in the hopes of creating a series based on the character, but ended up revealing that journalism does not exist. A fact to which we would have graciously conceded had we been asked:

They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“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.

Not to defend bloggers or anything, but it’s not really our job to report news, per se, but, rather, to present news — even potentially fakenews — in a way that draws in enough readers to sell ads and make money. The more sensational a news story, the better is happens to be for us, regardless of whether a story happens to be true. It’s not a joke job, really. We just need to step away from the notion that blogging is synonymous with journalism. It isn’t. As for MSNBC, well. They’re actually supposed to report news and maintain credibility so, yeah. They come off looking kind of stoopid:

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.”

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

Well. Some of us really just are dumber than others. Right, Monty? Come ‘ere and give us a big kiss, you adorable lug.

A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence [NYT]