Last Time We Checked, They Paid You to Check

Last week, MSNBC was forced to issue a retraction after being hoaxed by an internet blogger. John McCain advisor Martin Eisenstadt came forward to admit he was the source on a Fox News story regarding Sarah Palin, and MSNBC and several other major outlet blogs (LA Times, notably) bit on the Eisenstadt claim.

Eisenstadt, a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, said he was the source of the story that in debate prep, Palin said that Africa was a country.

Just a few problems with the story. There is no Harding Institute. There's not even a Martin Eisenstadt. It was all the creative invention of a pair of filmmakers, and they played the traditional media for the LOLs. The Times went with the rumor, thinking it was viable because it was passed along to the news desk via email from a friend. MSNBC quickly said they were sorry that the story had not been "properly vetted".

This might be a little less egregious if it was a one-off. Regretably for MSNBC, this was Eisenstadt's third political hoax of the year.

It was one of those earlier stories that the Associated Press had the quote of the day, this time from Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein.

"My only consolation is that if I had as much time on my hands as he clearly does, I probably would have figured this out and saved myself a fair amount of embarrassment."

Um. Gee. Aren't you guys the professionals -- as in the people that are PAID to figure these things out? And you were had by a bunch of "amateurs"?

Is it any shock that more and more people believe the established media less and less?

That is, unless that quote from Stein was too good to be true and I've been had by the other great trend. We spend less and less time seeking out opinions that don't reinforce our own, and more and more time