Fox News Sean Hannity Busted Again by Fox News

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Sean Hannity, a Murder and Why Imitation News Endures

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Credit... Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

• May 24, 2017

If we can learn annihilation from the latest triple-bank-shot of a conspiracy theory coursing through the alt-reality media — this one involving the unsolved murder of a Democratic National Committee staff fellow member named Seth Rich — it's this: Faux news dies hard.

God knows people have tried. In the concluding few months, journalists, academics, technology experts, civic-minded foundations and well-intentioned politicos have devoted decades of collective brain hours to an all-hands effort to stanch the conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods roiling our commonwealth.

Facebook and Google have worked upwards new computer formulas and dispatched dedicated teams of humans to push button the corrosive stuff off their platforms or, at the very least, to let readers know when something doesn't look correct. Ad makers are pulling their advertising from sites that run imitation items. And educators are working up "news literacy" programs to teach students how to tell the difference between real, corroborated journalism and naked lies dressed in the colors of veracity.

But as the Seth Rich story shows, we're going to need a bigger algorithm.

In example you oasis't been following it, the Seth Rich conspiracy holds that earlier his death (or, in this version of events, assassination) in July Mr. Rich had been involved in the leaking of Clinton campaign emails to WikiLeaks, which the United States intelligence community has attributed to Russian-sponsored hackers.

You lot can run across the partisan appeal. If you don't desire to believe American intelligence assessments that the Russians were behind the alienation — supposedly to help the electoral prospects of President Trump — and if you don't similar all the news about the investigations into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, well, there's an alternative fact gear up to grab onto: Mr. Rich did it and paid for it with his life.

The trouble, of form, is that there'southward no existent evidence for the notion.

The constabulary in Washington have theorized that a thief may have killed Mr. Rich in a botched robbery attempt.

The Rich story has been kicking around since July, only flared anew last week, when FoxNews.com and the Fox affiliate in Washington, WTTG, quoted an investigator working with the Rich family as saying that Mr. Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks before his expiry.

But when questioned by Oliver Darcy of CNN, the investigator acknowledged that, in fact, he had no evidence to suggest any such thing, and that he was merely repeating what the FoxNews.com reporter who interviewed him about the case had told him. (Ed Butowsky, a Dallas businessman who criticized Hillary Clinton last year, acknowledged to CNN that he helped connect the investigator with the Rich family unit after initially denying it to NBC.)

Notwithstanding, the story lived on as a meme flowing through conservative media, which seemed to relish the chance to change the subject from the torrent of news spilling along concluding week on the president's Russia troubles.

After calls from Mr. Rich's family unit to retract its article, FoxNews.com did so on Tuesday, saying in a statement that it had not gone through "the high caste of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting." It removed the article from its site.

Epitome

Credit... Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

But if you thought that would chasten people pushing the story and lead them to drop information technology, remember again.

Tuesday afternoon Sean Hannity, who had been perpetrating the Rich conspiracy theory on his nightly Trick News show, said on his radio program, "I am not Fox.com or FoxNews.com. I retracted zippo."

Something — like a reminder that he is under lucrative contract — must have changed in the hours that followed considering Mr. Hannity said on his prime-time bear witness on Fox that he would non be "discussing the matter at this time" out of "respect for the family'southward wishes." Astute listeners picked upwards on two other words in his argument: "For now."

Like water, conspiracy theories notice their ain level. And then, where Fox News issued its retraction, The International Business organisation Times put up a Facebook post that carried the headline, "BREAKING: Kim Dotcom claims he has evidence that proves murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was involved in the WikiLeaks hack."

The commodity explained that Kim Dotcom is "a New Zealand hacker" — wanted in the United States on racketeering charges, which he denies — and the sum total of the report was that he was making a "claim." It didn't include annihilation about what the details might be, though the hacker said he would exist happy to share those with investigators.

The unspecified claim was besides picked up past the Gateway Pundit (now credentialed by the White House) and the conspiracy site InfoWars, whose Washington bureau chief, Jerome Corsi, has a long history of spreading corrosive conspiracies. You might know him from his first big breakout hitting, "Unfit for Command," the volume of which he was a co-author that formed the ground of the false attack against Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War tape during the 2004 presidential campaign. Millennials may be more familiar with his more recent, anti-Obama "piece of work," like "Where'due south the Birth Certificate?" ("Right hither," Mr. Obama had answered.)

Those were books, and by today's standards, they may equally well have been stone tablets. Really, every bit The Financial Times recently noted, the false reportage dates to at least the propaganda war between Mark Antony and Octavian — fought in the century before the birth of Christ, communicated through coins. Coins became the printed folio, which became the political advertisement, which became the cablevision "news" segment, the blog mail service, the Twitter message and the Facebook postal service.

So what is new is the speed of the internet and the peculiarly fertile soil of our angry political divide.

Take heart, there are optimists. Brad Bauman, a spokesman for the Rich family (who is open about his piece of work as a liberal political consultant), said in an interview that the developments of this calendar week, capped by Fob News's retraction, "should not just serve every bit a cautionary tale but it should too serve as a bulletin that in the end, truth does prevail. Merely we need to be vigilant."

And Alan C. Miller, the founder of the News Literacy Project, which teaches middle- and high-schoolhouse students how to "sort fact from fiction in the digital age," said the developments of the last year had spurred many more converts to the crusade he began pursuing nigh 10 years ago.

"All the viral rumors, conspiracy theories and hoaxes were a wake-up call for at least some people, and certainly some institutions that are now moving to address this, including news organizations, social media organizations and educational institutions," he told me.

Just no matter what the media ecosystem does to stop uncorroborated conspiracies and false data, they volition continue to alive on equally long as there are people eager to spread it and viewers and readers eager to believe it. All the algorithms in the world can't stop that.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/business/media/seth-rich-fox-news-sean-hannity.html