It finally happened: my obsession with MSNBC has dovetailed with legitimate movie news! Sort of!

Tonight the New York Times broke the news that over a year ago, Dan Mirvish (filmmaker and co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival) and Eitan Gorlin (whose directorial debut, The Holy Land, won the Grand Jury Prize at that festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award) made up a fake adviser to John McCain named Martin Eisenstadt. On Monday, MSNBC’s David Schuster reported on air that Martin Eisenstadt had taken credit for the “Palin thinks Africa is a country” leak. Eisenstadt had indeed published a post on his blog (tagline: “Because freedom isn’t free”) claiming to be the leaker, which no one at MSNBC bothered to look into deeply before Schuster’s report, otherwise they might have discovered that Eisenstadt a) is a made up person, and b) didn’t actually talk to Carl Cameron, the Fox news reporter who broke the “anonymous sources say Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story.

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