The two men who made up the fake John McCain adviser Martin Eisenstadt went on Reliable Sources this morning. Host Howard Kurtz aired a clip from MSNBC in which Eisenstadt was cited as being the source of a leak related to Gov. Sarah Palin. Kurtz asked filmmakers Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin their reaction when MSNBC reported the news.

“I laughed out loud,” Mirvish said. “I mean, the funny part was we hadn’t even actively sent it to MSNBC. We had just posted this on our blog and they had found it on their own. Someone e-mailed it to a producer over there and they put it up. Which is funny because there were times over the course of our various other pranks that we had actively tried to get things onto air and into print but this wasn’t one of them. They just did it all on their own.”

The men also gave their take on the growing list of TV pundits:

KURTZ: Is the lesson here, the way that you guys have been able to pull this off, that the media are awfully gullible?

MIRVISH: That’s part of it. They’re gullible. They’ll believe anyone. If anyone had looked at our videos even for a minute or looked on our Web site, people would have known we were a hoax or a spoof or a satire for months. Just a little bit of research would have proven that out. But the other thing is that the 24 hour news cycle goes so fast and they really – they don’t always check and then the pundits they do have on, they are identified as “Republican strategist” or “Democratic strategist” and their only strategy seems to be picking out the red M&Ms at the green room on HARDBALL. Are these people any more qualified than the fake pundit we developed?

The entire transcript is after the jump…

Read more

The New York Times’ Richard Perez-Pena breaks the news of who Martin Eisenstadt really is. Or rather, who he’s not — an advisor to Sen. John McCain.

Instead, the duo behind the character that caused MSNBC’s David Shuster to report, albeit temporarily, a supposed source of Carl Cameron‘s story about Gov. Sarah Palin are Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, two filmmakers who have created an elaborate hoax that has lasted for more than a year.

“To be very clear, no, we were not the source for Carl Cameron and never spoke to him,” Mirvish tells TVNewser. “We took credit for his anonymous sourcing. If they were going to be cowards, then we figured we may as well step in.”

How did they come up with the name Martin Eisenstadt? “All the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names,” said Gorlin to the Times.

The reveal by the Times couldn’t have come on a better day for the hoaxers: A fake New York Times is circulating around the country today, ensuring the whole ruse can continue.