Who or What Is Martin Thomas Eisenstadt?

By now, most of us have heard the story first reported by Fox News about how Sarah Palin allegedly did not know that Africa was a continent, in addition to her not knowing all the countries in North America. Who would have leaked such seemingly damaging information?

Martin Eisenstadt, that's who.

In his blog post today, Eisenstadt, who served as a foreign policy advisor/Jewish liaison to the McCain campaign and as head of the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, proudly took responsibility for the leak. MSNBC and a blog called The New Republic reported the leak.

He said he did so did so because, "I don’t want [Fox News] to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer a la Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this."

Well, that sounds all well and good, except for one thing:

It appears that Martin Eisenstadt does not exist.

Bloggers William K. Wolfrum from Shakesville and Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones did some digging and concluded back in JUNE AND JULY, respectively, that the whole Eisenstadt thing is a hoax.

Wolfrum unequivocally stated, "There is no M. Thomas Eisenstadt. There is no Eisenstadt Group. There is no Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy."

The confusion seems to come from the fact that a Michael Eisenstadt works for the Washington Institute, and is a noted foreign policy expert. He has said publicly he is not M. Thomas Eisenstadt.

MSNBC's David Shuster has admitted it may have been made up, and The New Republic has retracted its post.

This collaboration of information originally comes from The Huffington Post.

In our class, we talk about the importance of not only getting stuff first, but getting it right. How long would it have taken MSNBC and The New Republic to do a bit of research and realize the whole thing was a sham?

Is the nature of modern journalism at fault? Was the need to get the story right sacrificed to get it reported first? Are journalists more susceptible now to these sorts of things than they have been before?