Martin Eisenstadt is the creation of a couple of film makers who also created a fake think tank for their creation to work for, the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. There are also some clips of "Martin Eisenstadt" on Youtube and a blog which are also faked. The film makers claim that they created "Martin Eisenstadt" as a character for a proposed TV series.

Why did the story that Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent gain such credibility in the media? Part of the reason is that the Internet tends to magnify the old saying by Mark Twain that by the time the truth puts on its shoes, a lie can travel half way around the world. The Internet is the perfect vehicle for spreading rumor and innuendo.

The other reason is that people in the mainstream media are quite willing to believe any story that suggest that a prominent conservative is a dimwit. It is no accident that the story of Sarah Palin and Africa started at MSNBC, a network that actually works at liberal bias rather than having it come naturally. But the story spread and was reported as fact across the media, newspapers, TV, and even talk radio.

President Ronald Reagan, who brought down the Soviet Empire with hardly a shot fired, was considered an "amiable dunce." George W. Bush, who has fought the War on Terror effectively and presided over an economic boom that only ended with the credit crisis brought on by Democrats, has been depicted as a dimwit frat boy, even in movies like W. So naturally if a conservative governor of Alaska is thought to be ignorant of the basic facts of geography, then it must be true.

What is Sarah Palin anyway? She did not go to the right schools. She did not go to the right cocktail parties. She did not hobnob with the right people. Of course she is some kind of country bumpkin who doesn't know Africa is a continent.

The story about Sarah Palin and Africa reminds one of the memogate scandal that brought down Dan Rather. Dan Rather and his producer got a hold of a memo they thought had been written in the 1970s that proved that George W. Bush got a slot in the Texas Air National Guard through undue influence. The problem was that the memo had been printed in a font that did not exist until the age of computerized word processing and laser printers. Rather and his producers would have known this had they checked, but they were so eager for the story of Bushian perfidy to be true, they ran with the story anyway. Sharp eyed bloggers noted and reported on the suspicious font. The memo was proven to be a fake. Rather was forced to retire in disgrace and his producer was fired.

The effect of the Sarah Palin Africa hoax is that some journalists will be briefly embarrassed, at least until the next bogus story about Republican idiocy and/or perfidy. Someone might even be quietly let go. But the culture that permits such thing to happen will, sadly, go on.

Source: A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence, Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times, November 12th, 2008