Macaca Moments

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

-from NY Times

This revelation didn't surprise me. I've suspected that motivated sorts with malicious and/or humorous intent were working to game the system. And with a mainstream media staffed with J-school pretty faces determined to report the very latest bits that confirm their biases we're pretty much guaranteed rampant information corruption. Too bad our democracy hinges upon our consumption of this fetid stinking tripe.

I've thought about the potential for Macaca Moments. You know, those bits where new media is employed to call out politicians in unflattering moments. As such bits have become increasingly potent in there ability to drive the media conversation for lengths of time, engineering such Macaca Moments is imperative. Indeed, my suspicions were raised several weeks back when the issue du jure was the burgeoning "hostility" in evidence at McCain/Palin rallies where YouTube clips seemingly recorded spectators shouting epithets and threats. In such clips there's no way to vet whether the spectator shouting such epithets was in fact a McCain supporter. They could just as easily have been someone opposed to McCain who knew (perhaps even staged) that the camera-phones were rolling and let lose with the invective. Yet the media discussion revolving around the clips suggested that the McCain/Palin rallies had incited anti-Obama hatred. For practitioners of guerrilla media, having the MSM take the bait and froth at the mouth over such horrors (when it could just as easily be illusion) is indeed mission accomplished. Especially when the other side (the one favored by the guerrillas) stands to benefit from the media gnashing its teeth.

Clearly We the People need to be on guard for such as it will get worse - much worse. Will our democracy survive our media when our media is so easily gamed?