Right-wing pundits got duped by fake Harry Reid story

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid may have suffered some bizarre facial injuries but some of the most popular right-wing pundits are red-faced with embarrassment after swallowing a phony story about how Reid was injured.
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Breitbart, and Laura Ingraham were all punked when they reported this month on the rumor that Larry Reid got drunk on New Year’s Eve and beat up his senator-brother Harry, then showed up intoxicated to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with an injured hand and relayed that he had just assaulted a family member.

The story was manufactured entirely in the mind of a Las Vegas man who decided to test the bounds of the right-wing world’s disdain for Reid. After some on the far right had speculated that Reid was beat up by the mob, Larry Pfeifer invented his tall tale about the brotherly brawl.

A veteran of the Vegas night club industry, Pfeifer created a pseudonym, Easton Elliott (the flip side of The Cars' guitarist maybe?) and peddled the story to John Hinderaker, a conservative blogger at Power Line.

Hinderaker ran with it. In response, as Raw Story summarizes the bizarre events, the right wing “went nuts.”

Six days later, Pfeifer was on Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show. Limbaugh repeated the bogus story on his radio broadcast. Beck and Breitbart followed suit.
Pfeifer told the Las Vegas Sun, which unearthed the scam, that he thought the entire matter would be over “in about a day and a half.”
But, determined to discredit the Nevada senator’s story that he hurt his face exercising with an elastic resistance band in his bathroom at home, the conservative crowd bought the juicy story that Reid was trying to keep things quiet about his brother/attacker.

Here’s how Raw Story describes the extent of the punditocracy’s eagerness to dish dirt:

“Pfeifer points out he deliberately added points to his story that would be easy to identify as false. … What’s more, when he leaked the information to reporters, Pfeifer used a false name. But many of them didn’t bother to verify his identity.
“In contrast, the Las Vegas Sun ‘demanded that Pfeifer reveal his legal name and show his driver’s license, then ran a public records check on him to verify his identity.’
“‘Why are people so bloodthirsty?’ Pfeifer muses to Sun reporters. ‘We’re all supposed to be good neighbors. Harry Reid’s a human being. If a complete stranger we knew was injured, wouldn’t we be concerned?’”

And here is Harry Reid's reaction:

I would hope that the senator understands the difference between Rush Limbaugh and journalism.