It is pretty remarkable that McCain staffers would claim to a reporter that Palin didn’t know Africa is a continent — remarkable if true, for obvious reasons, and remarkable if false because that would show an incredibly intense smear campaign. (It sounded implausible to me at first, but Andrew Sullivan* points out that nobody has denied the claim. Plus if it’s not true, why make it up when there are surely plenty of other true embarrassing tidbits they could have told instead?)

But something else struck me in watching the video. Two-thirds of the way through (starting at 2:05), Cameron switches to reporting the spin from those in the McCain camp who are still defending the Palin pick.** He says (or rather they say) that McCain was leading from the time he picked Palin until Lehman Brothers failed. In other words, the economy, not Palin, lost it for McCain.

Then, before you can say fair and balanced, anchor Shepard Smith smoothly counters:

“You know, I was actually in a meeting last night before the election coverage began. We were going over the charts of when Barack Obama’s numbers actually went up. And the reading of the polls by our decision team was that in fact it didn’t start there but it started four days earlier — the day after the Palin interview with Katie Couric.”

That leaves Cameron speechless for almost three seconds. And his response has nothing to do with Smith’s polling point.

This video comes a day after another striking Shepard Smith performance, in which he presided over Ralph Nader’s final descent into crazy-old-man irrelevancy. Here’s Smith asking Nader if he wanted to retract his comment from earlier in the day that Obama’s “choice, basically, is whether he’s going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations”:

And that video came a week after Smith pushed back against one Mr. Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (aka Joe The Oh, Enough Already) when the living campaign prop kept spouting nonsense about Obama being a danger to Israel. At the end of the segment, Smith said (as quoted in a New York Times editorial praising the anchor):

“I just want to make this 100 percent perfectly clear. Barack Obama has said repeatedly and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States no matter what happens once he becomes president of the United States. His words. The rest of it, man — it just gets frightening sometimes.”

So here’s my question: What’s gotten into Shepard Smith? Has he always dissented from the Hannity-and-terrorist-fist-jabbing wing of Fox News? Or is this something new — something in the Fox News water fountain, perhaps, that Major Garrett is also drinking? Either way, let’s hope we see more of it.

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* Andrew Sullivan has a great post about the implications of reporters waiting until after the election to mention that McCain’s people, contrary to their public statements of support, thought Palin was horribly unprepared: “the McCain campaign and their media enablers were putting this country and the world at serious risk by perpetuating this farce.”

** My favorite part of the Cameron report is when he describes McCain’s reasoning for picking Palin:

“McCain and his aides concluded that the then-shortlist wasn’t [sic] inadequate to, quote, change the game. In their own vernacular, they had to throw the ball downfield. Translation: hail Mary. That was what Sarah Palin was.”

I love that he has to “translate” one cliche — “throw the ball downfield” — into an even more cliched cliche.

UPDATE: And Shepard Smith does it again:

I get that. But I also agree with Andrew Sullivan about what’s at stake in this election.

We need to think about: Who best can win the war on terror? Who best can extricate us from Iraq? Who best can handle Pakistan? Who best can manage the financial meltdown? Who best will rid us of addiction to foreign oil? Who best can unite the country? Who best can tackle the enormous debt the Bush-Cheney years have landed us with? Who best can restore America’s core abhorrence of torture?

Now watch these videos.

In this campaign, Obama is trying to lead a national discussion about Sullivan’s questions. A public, serious discussion. Four years ago, John Kerry did the same. Four years before that, Al Gore did the same.

You may disagree with their answers, but at least they had the integrity and gumption to first think deeply about the questions and then honestly explain their answers to the American people.

John McCain, Sarah Palin, their party, and their party’s operatives are doing everything humanly possible to avoid this discussion altogether. Four years ago, George W. Bush did the same. Four years before that, ditto.

What does that say about John McCain and his party?

I first became aware of the post-CompuServe Internet when my brother was in college, circa 1992. I was so excited that he somehow had access to all the important information I couldn’t find anywhere else: namely, the special moves for Street Fighter II. I think Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam secrets were also big on my list of Net-procured info, but Street Fighter was the main treasure.

I remember my brother mentioning Archie and Veronica — two early search engines — and I had no idea what he was talking about, though I must have used one or both to find the video game tricks. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the first time I used a Web browser. In my memory, browsers just exist after a point.

Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the Vanity Fair piece…

Marc Andreessen (Mosaic/Netscape/Ning maven), on making a graphical program to access the Internet:

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time, that was an original idea. When we were working on Mosaic during Christmas break between 1992 and 1993, I went out at like four in the morning to a 7-Eleven to get something to eat, and there was the first issue of Wired on the shelf. I bought it. In it there’s all this science-fiction stuff. The Internet’s not mentioned. Even in Wired.

My first thought after reading that was, Then what the heck was in the first issue of Wired? But after a quick glance at the first issue, I see that Andreessen is maybe exaggerating just a tad. (The Wired article that does mention the Internet — possibly a library/academic version if you want to be charitable toward Andreessen’s memory — includes this pre-file-sharing sentiment that’s either prescient or quaint [italics added]: “If someday in the future anybody can get an electronic copy of any book from a library free of charge, why should anyone ever set foot in a bookstore again?”)

In the unheeded-visionary department, we have two gems. First is Silicon Graphics/Netscape Communications founder Jim Clark:

One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with the Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo.

Ummm, good thing there were so many media folks who paid attention to people like Jim Clark.

Then there’s Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who had an even more specific pitch/warning for newspapers:

The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo, or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising.

The luddite ignorance would almost be funny if not for the current havoc that stems pretty much directly — albeit a decade in the making — from said ignorance.

Of course, the Internet being the Internet (i.e. awesome), I also came across two posts today that show how far ahead of the technology curve journalists are in many respects.

First (via the always-excellent Hitsville) is a story from the Arizona Republic about a fight between Phoenix’s mayor and a county sheriff. In the course of reciprocal investigations, the sheriff sought six months worth of Phoenix officials’ e-mails. Can you guess how the information was delivered? No — not by burning the material on a CD. That would be too easy and cheap! Instead, they printed out more than 10,000 pages and scanned them, costing $2,000 in taxpayer money. (Though as Bill Wyman points out at Hitsville, the paper somehow construed this as saving taxpayers money.)

And finally, we come to this fully reassuring quote from a John McCain campaign official (via The Plank):

You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.

I can see the bumper sticker now: “McCain in ’08: He kinda sorta knows about that Internet thingy!”