Bloggers In Pajamas??

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"North To Alaska" - Johnny Horton (1960)

In today's blog/vlog trifecta, Eags leads off with an assessment of Seward's Folly "way Up North." Following Eags' vivisection of politics Way Up North, a Salon blogger, Paul Levinson, picks up on the whiny Governor of Alaska who blames "bloggers in pajamas" for the perception that she is a bimbo who belongs in the witless protection program. In particular, The Mighty Quinnette refutes the viral chestnut that started on the Internet and made its way to Faux News and then to MSNBC that she, the Governor of Alaska, didn't even know that Africa was a continent, not a country. It seems that The Mighty Q was punked, not once (by a morning talk show DJ in Montreal pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy), but twice by bloggers in pajamas! Thanks to the NY Fishwrap, a pair of slackers named Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin were outed in the "Africa is a country" flap. The intrepid bloggers created a think-tank they called "The Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy" and portrayed Gorlin as "Dr. Martin Eisenstadt, Senior Fellow at The Harding Institute." The clincher for Faux News was that "Eisenstadt" was a member of the McCain staff trying to bring The Mighty Q up to speed on world affairs. "Eisenstadt" leaked the "Africa is a country" canard to the media and the rest, as they say, is history.

What have we learned today? Well, thanks to a friend of this blog in the Dairy State, we are guided by the wise words of one of the greatest historians in the 20th-century United States, the late Richard Hofstadter. In his Pulitzer-Prize-winning, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955), Hofstadter wrote:

...The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth.¹ The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.
...
¹By myth, as I use the word here, I do not mean an idea that is simply false, but rather one that so effectively embodies men's values that it profoundly influences their way of perceiving reality and hence their behavior. In this sense, myths may have varying degrees of fiction or reality. The agrarian myth became increasingly fictional as time went on.

Just as there was the Agrarian Myth, there was a Frontier Myth, and a Myth of the Self-Made Man. Now — in 2008 — we have the Myth of the Maverick, the Myth of the Plumber/Small Business Owner, and the Myth of the Caribou Barbie. Remember that Hostadter wrote that myths contain "varying degrees of fiction or reality." Possibly "bloggers in pajams" is a myth too, although this blog is being written at this moment by a deranged man in his... pajamas. If this is (fair & balanced) myth-making, so be it.

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] Eags On Politics "Way Up North"
[2] Paul Levinson On The Might Q's Problem With Bloggers
[3] The NY Fishwrap Outs The "Africa Is A Country" Bloggers

[x NY Fishwrap]
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Last-Frontier Follies
By Timothy Egan

Between big servings of moose chili and self-servings of blather, Governor Sarah Palin has yet to explain the disturbing message that our 49th state sent to the Outside with last week’s election.

Nearly half the voters want to send a felon back to the United States Senate – you go, crook! And a clear majority is backing one of the most ethically tainted congressmen in the land – power to the porkster!

Oh, and all that stuff about wealth-redistribution: Only one state relies on a truly socialistic model for its welfare, and with falling oil prices, Palin’s People’s Republic of Alaska is facing an enormous fiscal crisis.

This tax-free state, where every man, woman and baby gets an annual check as part of their share of redistributed oil wealth, may have to actually start paying for itself.

But none of this has crossed the glossy lips of the governor. As Palin was spreading a cartoon narrative of herself as a caribou-huntin’ gal on the lookout for creeping Marxism while slaying the bad boys of the Far North, the state that she governs was stepping all over her message.

Mind you, the press has been easily charmed once inside the reality-controlled comfort of Palin’s home. But that doesn’t excuse my fellow beleaguered journalists from asking about the stuff just outside the windows in Wasilla.

For starters, we have the prospect of Don Young returning to Congress. Though thousands of ballots are yet to be counted, Young still leads by a sizeable margin. The Congressman for Life, first elected about the same time that Palin was teething, has spent more than a million dollars in legal fees fending off a federal corruption investigation.

He’s the guy behind the Bridge to Nowhere, who bragged that he wanted to be the chief “oinker” in Alaska. He’s the guy who tried to give Florida a freeway access earmark that nobody in that state wanted except one of Young’s big contributors. He’s the guy who used a compound-verb profanity in describing to school children why he hated an artist’s photographs of homosexuals.

Young also has close ties to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist-felon. Everywhere else, Abramoff is radioactive. But in Alaska, he must be the gold standard.

Gutter-mouthed and pork-stained he may be, but Alaska’s sole face in the House of Representatives is sweetness and light compared to the dark soul of Ted Stevens. The 84-year-old senator is an ornery, grumbling curmudgeon who has repeatedly vowed vengeance against fellow senators who voted against his wishes and the oil companies he protects.

Last month, Stevens was convicted of seven felonies by a jury in Washington, D.C. He promptly returned to Alaska and told people that no, in fact, he was not a convicted felon — his case was on appeal. You hear this kind of stuff in the Joint all the time — from bank-robbers, sex offenders and assorted thugs.

Denial must be a branch of the Yukon River, for it was in the same spirit that Palin told reporters, just after a state legislative report stated that she violated ethical statutes, that she was now “cleared of any hint of unethical activity.”

Both Young and Stevens were supposed to lose on election day, so the polls said. But there was a shocking and somewhat mystifying low turnout, given Palin’s name at the top of the ballot. As of late Wednesday, after a count of an additional 40,000 ballots, Stevens was trailing by a mere three votes. Young was up by more than 15,000 and cruising to another term.

Handcuffs may be the only way to remove this pair.

Remember all the tsk-tsking after Marion Barry was elected to a fresh term as mayor of Washington, D.C., despite having served prison time for cocaine possession? How could voters elect a crack-head to lead them?

Later this winter, when daylight in Alaska is a distant memory, Palin will have to make some hard choices about her redistributionist state. Under the expert grubstaking of Stevens and Young, Alaska had received nearly two dollars in federal funds for every dollar it contributed in tax revenue.

This is bound to change if Palin says thanks, but no thanks, to more pork. But then Palin will have to deal with a bigger problem. At home, all the wealth-spreading to anyone with a pulse and an Alaska residence depends on high oil prices. To keep state government afloat, oil has to remain above $74 a barrel. This week, it was below $60.

In the meantime, Palin has become a microphone magnet. But it’s all for a good cause. As she explained last week: “We’ll take advantage of the opportunities to keep spreading that pro-Alaska message all across the nation.”

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company
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Palin Brings "Bloggers In Pajamas" Back Into The Limelight
By Paul Levinson

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Faux News — "On The Record With Greta Van Susteren"
November 7. 2008

Not everyone is a fan of new media. Back in September 2004, Jonathan Klein, then a former CBS News exec, defended Dan Rather's 60 Minutes segment about George W. Bush's lack of National Guard service during the Vietnam War by observing that, "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Klein, who would soon be appointed CNN/USA President, was attacking the conservative bloggers who were attacking Rather and CBS, and although I thought then and now that CBS and Rather were right to run that story, I certainly didn't agree with Klein's myopic "analysis" of blogging. Given the power and reach of the Internet, and the way all kinds of information can become available in all sorts of unexpected ways, it struck me then that pajamas and basements were no impediments to the pursuit and publication of truth.

That's obviously much more the case today. But the "bloggers in pajamas" meme lives on, not just as a justifiably sarcastic comment on Klein's 2004 statement and any like-minded old media worshipers still among us, and the name of a successful online news venue (Pajamas Media), but ... somehow, unsurprisingly, in that special lingo of none other than Sarah Palin, who last night told Greta Van Susteren on Fox that a lot of the media's negative stories about her were due to their reporting on the basis of "some blogger, probably sitting there in their parents' basement, wearing pajamas, blogging some kind of gossip, or a lie".

Now, in Klein's defense in 2004, new media were much newer then than they are now. The Huffington Post, YouTube, and Twitter didn't even exist yet, and Facebook was just a few months old. Palin's attack is thus much more ludicrous than Klein's, because it ignores the massively greater and diverse sources of information that any blogger can call upon today.

But facts seem beyond Palin's grasp or interest, whether in real world or online geography. And the irony is that her worst moment with the media in the campaign just concluded came not from a blogger in pajamas, but from well-dressed Katie Couric on mainstream CBS, who asked Sarah Palin what newspapers she read, and she couldn't name a single one.

Maybe she was getting her news from some blog....

[Paul Levinson is Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City. Levinson received a BA in journalism from New York University in 1975; an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in 1976; and a PhD from New York University in media ecology in 1979.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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[x NY Fishwrap]
A Senior Fellow At The Institute Of Nonexistence
By Richard Pérez-Peña

Dan Mirvish (in pajamas) and collaborator Eitan Gorlin created an
Internet hoax with a fake policy institute and a phony McCain adviser


Eitan Gorlin as the phony McCain adviser Martin Eisenstadt

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.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh.

(For what it’s worth, another reporter for The New York Times is an acquaintance of Mr. Gorlin and vouches for his identity, and Mr. Gorlin is indeed “Mr. Eisenstadt” in those videos. He and his partner in deception, Dan Mirvish, have entries on the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com. But still. ...)

They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.

Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.

An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.”

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, who Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish said was the original idea for a TV series.

Soon there were videos showing him driving a car while spouting offensive, opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph W. Giuliani. Those videos attracted tens of thousands of Internet hits and a bit of news media attention.

When Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the presidential race, the character morphed into Eisenstadt, a parody of a blowhard cable news commentator.

Mr. Gorlin said they chose the name because “all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”

Eisenstadt became an adviser to Senator John McCain and got a blog, updated occasionally with comments claiming insider knowledge, and other bloggers began quoting and linking to it. It mixed weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.

The inventors fabricated the Harding Institute, named for one of the most scorned presidents, and made Eisenstadt a senior fellow.

It didn’t hurt that a man named Michael Eisenstadt is a real expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is quoted in the mainstream media. The real Mr. Eisenstadt said in an interview that he was only dimly aware of the fake one, and that his main concern was that people understood that “I had nothing to do with this.”

Before long Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish had produced a short documentary on Martin Eisenstadt, supposedly for the BBC, posted in several parts on YouTube.

In June they produced what appeared to be an interview with Eisenstadt on Iraqi television promoting construction of a casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Then they sent out a news release in which he apologized. Outraged Iraqi bloggers protested the casino idea.

Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.

In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.

Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating, the disgraced former savings and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.

Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”

But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For months sourcewatch.org has identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this thing out.”

And then there is William K. Wolfrum, a blogger who has played Javert to Eisenstadt’s Valjean, tracking the hoaxster across cyberspace and repeatedly debunking his claims. Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish praised his tenacity, adding that the news media could learn something from him.

“As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist,” Mr. Wolfrum said in an interview.

And how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?

Long pause. “Yeah, that’s a tough one.”

[Richard Pérez-Peña, The New York Times senior media writer, covers the new media in the U.S.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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