Don't Believe (or Blog) Everything You Read

You may have heard it reported that a particular vice-presidential candidate was unusually geographically challenged, being unaware that Africa is a continent.  This may be true, but the purported McCain adviser who supposedly leaked the story to the press is a figment of the imagination of two filmmakers.  The putative Martin Eisenstadt has duped a number of traditional news sources during the course of the presidential campaign.  By publishing plausible lies, this "Senior Fellow of the Harding Institute" (a non-existent think-tank) has sent ripples of unreliable reporting through the blogosphere, with its penchant for self-referential mining of other bloggers' blogs. See the story in The New York Times