MSNBC anchor David Shuster was the victim of a hoax.

On Monday, he said the source for a particularly salacious piece of gossip about Sarah Palin (that she thought Africa was a country) was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy advisor. After all, Eisenstadt said so on his blog.

By Wednesday, the New York Times had the whole story, and MSNBC was running a correction.

Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish created the character of Eisenstadt, and created his blog, designed a Web site for the fake think tank he works for and filmed YouTube videos of Eisenstadt in action (played by Gorlin).

MSNBC wasn’t the first news organization to be fooled by Eisenstadt. Mother Jones blogger Jonathan Stein was tricked by Eisenstadt in July, but in his retraction post, he fully documented the commentator was fake. Gawker called bull on the “adviser” on Nov. 4, a full week before the MSNBC story ran. And if an MSNBC researcher just Googled Eisenstadt’s name, he would have found some sites that had outed Eisenstadt as a hoax as early as June 27.

So David Shuster got fooled. And in retrospect, Martin Eisenstadt isn’t too convincing of an advisor (just watch those YouTube videos!). But it worked just the same. If you want to create a fake policy adviser, how do you do it? What’s the best way to hoax the media?

Step 1: Come up with a believable name. Per Eitan Gorlin, he and Mirvish settled on Martin Eisenstadt because, he told the Times, “all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”

Step 2: Say you work for a think tank named after a president who governed in the 1920s. Just check out the mission statement pages of the real Hoover Institution and the fake Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy.

Step 3: Say something the media outlets want to hear. Formerly anonymous source coming forward to admit he’s a backstabbing staff member? Of course we’ll report it! (Documents proving George W. Bush was a lousy Air National Guard member? Of course we’ll use them!)

Step 4: Remind yourself of a couple Internet truisms: Anything written online is true, therefore, your fake adviser’s blog will be believed to be true. And don’t forget the second truism: Anything sent via e-mail is true, too.  MSNBC spokesperson Jeremy Gaines told the Times that someone in the newsroom learned about the Palin source from a colleague via e-mail and assumed it had been verified.

So where will the next hoaxter come from? Who knows? But one piece of advice: Don’t trust any senior fellows from the James Buchanan Equality Institute.