Detroit Free Press Web Editor Mark W. Smith advances the speculative claim that Kanye West's interruption of Taylor's Video Music Award acceptance was a hoax, and that "we have all been punked":

What started as a rapper behaving badly quickly transformed into a three-act opus of tweeted outrage, must-see TV and tearful apologies, spanning three networks and generating millions of video views across the Web.

We all know the story: Kanye West stole the spotlight Sunday from Taylor Swift, snatching her microphone to tell that world that it was Beyoncé who deserved the teen's first Video Music Award.

All the parties involved -- the now infamous West, the innocent Swift, the classy Beyoncé -- stood to gain from a bit of drama.

So, have we all been taken for a ride?

In a world where scandals spread instantly across social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, MTV was positioned to gain the most from a buzzworthy moment.

The network did its part by making the incident available for viewing almost immediately on its Web site, even before the show ended on the East Coast. And then, in a game of "media whack-a-mole" as the New York Times calls it, MTV instantly began to flag versions of the video on YouTube uploaded by Regular Joes, ensuring anyone who wanted to see the video would have to end up at MTV's Web site.

To its credit, MTV did also make the video easily embeddable elsewhere (and we took full advantage of that here on Browser), but of course MTV still rakes in the video views.

Oh, and don't mind that pesky ad ...

MTV is no stranger to award show hoaxes. During the network's Movie Awards in June, Sacha Baron Cohen descended from the rafters dressed as the flamboyantly gay character Bruno, landing on Eminem's lap wearing a thong and angel wings.

Eminem played his part, feigned outrage and left the award show. The next day, sources told Entertainment Weekly it was a publicity stunt to promote the movie "Bruno."

On Day 2, the West-Swift scandal's wealth spread to NBC Universal and its much-hyped premiere of Jay Leno's new show.

West was previously scheduled to perform -- along with Jay-Z and Rihanna -- but the show was reorganized to include a three-minute interview with the rapper.

Before the interview, Leno was unusually clear that the interview was a last-minute add and not planned.

Leno had the watercooler moment of the night when he asked West what his mother would have thought of the outburst. West's mother died in 2007 from botched cosmetic surgery.

What followed was 20 seconds of silence and emotional reflection from West: TV gold.

Leno's prime-time premiere was seen by 18 million people, beating expectations.

Using similar logic, you could say that anything was a publicity stunt.

At any time.

That's the cool thing about it; you could even get the parties themselves to agree (after the fact of course), that what happened was deliberate, and had been planned that way.

I'd be willing to bet that we'll see more such "publicity stunts."

What I can't figure out is whether Barack Obama also got punked, or whether MTV paid him to call West a "jackass."