Faking it
Dan Mirvish, co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival (Sundance's upstart kid brother), has always been a bit of a trickster. But his latest prank, with his partner-in-crime Eitan Gorlin, has stirred all kinds of trouble.
According to this New York Times article, Mirvish and Gorlin cooked up the story - which ran on Fox News and MSNBC - that an anonymous staffer in the John McCain campaign had said that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin thought Africa was a single country and not a continent.
Mirvish and Gorlin invented a character, a policy analyst named Martin Eisenstadt (played by Gorlin), to dispense soundbites for reporters and bloggers. Eisenstadt even had a blog and a fictional think tank backing him up, the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy.
"Eisenstadt" also helped foster the story that Paris Hilton's grandfather was angry at the McCain campaign for insulting Paris in an anti-Barack Obama ad.
The purpose for doing all this? To pitch a TV show based on the Eisenstadt character - but also to show the gullibility of the mainstream media and the blogosphere.
It also shows that a hoax succeeds when the source material is wacky enough without embellishment. If Palin hadn't come off so clueless in early interviews, and so stubborn in later appearances, it would have been less plausible to think she didn't know Africa is a continent.
According to this New York Times article, Mirvish and Gorlin cooked up the story - which ran on Fox News and MSNBC - that an anonymous staffer in the John McCain campaign had said that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin thought Africa was a single country and not a continent.
Mirvish and Gorlin invented a character, a policy analyst named Martin Eisenstadt (played by Gorlin), to dispense soundbites for reporters and bloggers. Eisenstadt even had a blog and a fictional think tank backing him up, the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy.
"Eisenstadt" also helped foster the story that Paris Hilton's grandfather was angry at the McCain campaign for insulting Paris in an anti-Barack Obama ad.
The purpose for doing all this? To pitch a TV show based on the Eisenstadt character - but also to show the gullibility of the mainstream media and the blogosphere.
It also shows that a hoax succeeds when the source material is wacky enough without embellishment. If Palin hadn't come off so clueless in early interviews, and so stubborn in later appearances, it would have been less plausible to think she didn't know Africa is a continent.
Labels: John McCain, Sarah Palin, Slamdance Film Festival
posted by Sean P. Means @ 12:42 PM |
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