Gabriel Sherman is a widely published writer of articles in some of the country’s leading mainstream magazines. Currently, he’s a Vanity Fair special correspondent in addition to being a frequent NBC News/MSNBC contributor. Sherman’s favorite target for his screeds, aside from President Trump, is Fox News, its management, and its on-air personalities. In 2014, Sherman wrote a sensational, best-selling unauthorized biography of Fox News co-founder and CEO Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country. Last year, the book was the basis for a seven-part dramatic miniseries on Showtime, starring the bombastic Australian actor Russell Crowe as Ailes.

On Friday, it appears that Sherman was finally hoisted on his own petard – or, in the current vernacular, “punked.” Appearing on fellow Vanity Fair special correspondent Nick Bilton’s podcast Inside the Hive, hosted on the magazine’s servers, Sherman told an anecdote that he and Bilton gleefully agreed summed up “the latest evidence of the president’s mental decay.” In the article at Vanity Fair about the podcast, titled “You Won’t Believe What Trump Said About His Middle Name,” Bilton writes:

In the midst of the Golden Globes, as celebrities strolled the red carpet, smiling for the paparazzi, it felt like outside the confines of Tinseltown the world was boiling. Iran had struck an American air base in Iraq, Donald Trump was twittering away stirring the pot, and Australia was feeling the brunt of decades of disastrous climate change decisions. On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman, who was attending the Globes for his show, The Loudest Voice, relayed a story that sums up the Trump presidency and the mess we’re currently living in. Standing near the bar, Sherman ran into Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, and the two started chatting. Sherman asked Luntz when he last saw the President. “Last week, at the White House Christmas party,” Luntz said. Sherman asked what the two men talked about, to which Luntz replied that he had asked Trump what his middle initial “J” stands for. “Genius,” Trump responded.

Gabriel Sherman appearing on CNN, July 25, 2016 when he was an editor at New York Magazine / CNN YouTube screen shot

At 6:54 P.M. E.T. on Friday, Bilton tweeted a link to his article and podcast to the delight of his 260,000 Twitter followers.

On Inside the Hive this week @gabrielsherman tells this short hilarious and sad story about Trump that pretty much sums up his presidency.

Bilton’s tweet included a screen shot from the article hyping the sensational claims about Trump made by Sherman. It has been retweeted over 2,000 times.

Obviously proud of his and Bilton’s efforts, Sherman has retweeted Bilton’s tweet linking to the podcast and the article at least twice. Their fake news story has been picked up by numerous other Trump-hating mainstream media outlets.

Frank Luntz in 2015 // Photo by Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0

Shortly after Frank Luntz, the purported source for the story, got wind of the claims in the Vanity Fair article and podcast, he responded in a tweet of his own on Saturday at 11:30 A.M. E.T.:

I’ve been telling this joke at parties for years, and @GabrielSherman is the first person to think it was real. That’s what happens when the media wants to spin anything as “Orange Man bad!” Gonna be a long 5 more years…

Despite Luntz’s clarification that his oft-repeated comment about Trump’s middle name being “Genius” was a joke, no corrections have been issued. Vanity Fair’s article, podcast, and Sherman’s and Bilton‘s tweets remain online.

A seasoned observer of the mainstream media landscape commented that this is an “example of Gabe Sherman’s ongoing credibility collapse.” Touché.

It could also be said that it’s another prime case history of the making of Fake News in the Era of Donald Trump.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter's website is http://peter.media. His new YouTube channel is here. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.