Martin Eisenstadt
A week after the election, this guy claimed to be the McCain policy adviser who leaked the news that Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent. MSNBC even quoted him as the source for this juicy evidence of the Alaska governor's incompetence, but it was the journalists who ended up looking stupid. Someone in McCainland did leak the story, but it wasn't Eisenstadt because he was a hoax, a fake character with his own fake think tank and fake blog, dreamed up by two filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish. Since the summer, reporters for Mother Jones, The Los Angeles Times and The New Republic were pranked by Eisenstadt's just-slightly-incredible news releases, even though sourcewatch.org and blogger William Wolfrum had been calling his bluff for months. Which proves that the 24-hour news cycle is indeed making us all dumber.