By: Michael Calderone

Toby Harnden, U.S. Editor of The Daily Telegraph, writes on the Martin Eisenstadt hoax and Sarah Palin, posing the question, "Do you think she will get an apology?"

Harden doesn’t buy that it’s just the frenzy of the 24/7 news cycle in picking up the fake blog post, with claims that Palin not only didn’t know Africa was a continent or the countries in NAFTA — as Fox’s Carl Cameron reported — but also didn’t know Sunnis from Shia, or Hezbollah from Hamas.

This just fitted the stereotype of what so many want to think about her. If a bogus Democratic adviser had been blogging similarly about Joe Biden do you think it would have spread so quickly?

Politico’s Ben Smith gets it, citing a convincing Union-Leader takedown of many of several of Newsweek’s damaging details about Palin. Drawing attention to the "cottage industry" of mocking Palin, Ben pronounces himself "a bit nervous about a lot of the blindly sourced details about her."

So the main problem here is not that some in the media don’t check stuff on the web. It’s that they’re prepared to believe — and write — anything about Sarah Palin.

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