The New York Times thinks it’s cute that a couple of obscure filmmakers have repeatedly duped several big media outlets into printing outlandishly false stories.

What’s more, the Times story agrees with the hoaxter in placing the blame on the blogosphere instead of on the mainstream media.

The very opposite is true.

Here’s what happened, as the Times story accurately recounts it:

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

Eisenstadt has been doing this for several months, the story notes, and other publications taken in by his hoaxes include The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times. The story does not acknowledge that the New York Times itself recounted the absurdly false claim about Palin.

Most importantly, as noted earlier, the story sides with the hoaxters in laying most of the blame on bloggers:

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

Note the deceptive wording: "most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers." Of course most of his victims would be bloggers—there are thousands of them and only a few mainstream media outlets. Very, very few of these blogs have even a small fraction of the reach of the mainstream outlets, however, and that makes their mistakes much less egregious and important than those by the major media.

Moreover, a great many bloggers opposed the Republican ticket and would have been delighted to recount such an embarrassing story. The readers of all blogs, however, would not assume that the reporters had dug up this nugget themselves but were in fact simply commenting on a fact derived elsewhere. As with talk radio and newspaper opeds, people expect bloggers to be giving opinion and analysis, not original reporting, unless the blogger says otherwise.

In fact, the great majority of those bloggers who reported the story surely got their information from the mainstream sources taken in by the hoax and recounted it in good faith, assuming—incorrectly, it turns out—that the big-media outlets had done the requisite fact-checking before moving forward with the story.

Once the story hit the first few media outlets, even places such as Fox News, thought to be more sympathetic to McCain-Palin than most, recounted it in good faith. No one saw fit to check something that had been reported by such "credible" sources as MSNBC. It is those who raced to report it initially and have big audiences who are fully responsible for the dissemination of this blatant calumny.

So the real story here is the one the New York Times failed to report: that the hoax incident shows the appallingly low standards among the mainstream media, not the blogosphere.

And why were the standards ignored in this case? The answer could not be more obvious: because from the mainstream press’s perspective as rabid haters of Republicans and the American right, the juicy tidbit about Palin was too good to pass up and too important to waste time checking for accuracy.

That’s the real scandal here.