How Conspiracy Theorists Fake News
During the presidential campaign, unfounded conspiracy theories regularly made their way from the fringes into mainstream news reports. That problem has not gone away. Last July, a 27-year-old staffer for the Democratic National Committee was shot to death here in Washington. D.C. police say it was a botched robbery.
That has not stopped a runaway conspiracy theory that Seth Rich's death was an assassination, that Rich gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks and was killed to cover it up. The outlets pushing this narrative without evidence include Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke about it yesterday morning.
The only way for this to work, in absence of evidence, is to claim that the DNC, Clinton Campaign, Police, the Rich family, the Media and FBI are somehow involved in a massive coverup to prevent Seth Rich's death from being investigated. That's almost (but not quite) as good as the Birther nonsense where the conspiracy includes Hawaii government officials and employees, the Media, the President, and Congress to all work in cahoots to perpetrate a "massive conspiracy" on the American people.
This story has dominated conservative media and the squirrel infested fake news ecosystem over the past days.
Then it fell apart.
First Squirrel: Not Russia but an Inside Job! Dead DNC Staffer "had contact" with Wikileaks!
Ok...where is the evidence for this claim?
Second Squirrel: Seth Rich Slain [by nefarious shadowly Clintonistas] because he knew too much! FBI and Police Stonewalling Investigation!
Third Squirrel: Private Investigator hired by family found evidence! This ran as a lead story in Fox until....
it crashed and burned, had to be revised and retracted.
TV news can be an easy mark. This iteration of the Seth Rich story started when the District's own Fox 5 ran a Monday night “exclusive,” citing one source — a Fox New legal commentator, Rod Wheeler — for a “big break in the investigation.” Reporter Marina Marraco reported that “conspiracy theories” could “be proven right,” as Wheeler was saying what had been rumored since last year: Rich might have leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks, making him the target of an assassination.
“You have information that could link Seth Rich to WikiLeaks?” asked Marraco.
“Absolutely. Yeah. That's confirmed,” said Wheeler, who Fox 5 identified as the Rich family's investigator.
Within 24 hours, reporters at NBC News, CNN and The Washington Post had debunked the story. First, Rich's family quickly corrected the idea that Wheeler was on their payroll; he was hired by Ed Butowsky, a Texas businessman who had grown interested in the case. Next, Wheeler told CNN he hadn't actually obtained information linking Rich to WikiLeaks — Fox 5, he insisted, had told him to say so.
Marraco did not cite any sources except Wheeler — not the Rich family, not D.C. police, not the mayor's office, not the DNC. Wheeler, a very occasional TV pundit, was noticeably skimpy on details, suggesting he had a source who'd told him eyeball-to-eyeball that Rich's computer was in lock-up and that it had evidence of WikiLeaks contact. But he was murky on whether D.C. police or the FBI allegedly had the laptop, and the family quickly reported that neither did.
Some Chipmunks:
The theory that Rich must have been killed by nefarious forces at the Democratic National Committee, as punishment for his betrayal to WikiLeaks, has bubbled long enough to have several memes ready for the latest eruption. Even before the Fox5 segment, the #SethRich and #HisNameWasSethRich hashtag were active; the latest “break” in the story came when Robbin Young, a former model who calls herself a “Bond Girl” on the strength of a small role in “For Your Eyes Only,” published unverified messages that she claimed showed the hacker Guccifer 2.0 crediting Rich for the leak.
Rush Limbaugh, who discussed the story this week, was just as ready to roll over the facts. After playing a clip of the debunked Wheeler story, in which the investigator claimed that authorities were preventing him from probing the Rich-WikiLeaks connection, Limbaugh claimed that the hacked emails had also been locked up. “Nobody has seen the 44,000 emails! They're on this guy's laptop.” But everyone who's wanted to has seen those emails — they have been on WikiLeaks's servers since last year.
And now...we have the latest installment: Kim Dotcom (an accused copyright violator facing extradition) claiming in Twitter that
The article sums it up with:
So: Dotcom, who is facing extradition from New Zealand to America, and who has personally blamed Barack Obama for his legal trouble, claims in May 2017 that he knew crucial details about a political murder from July 2016. Why would he have sat on that during a hotly contested election, one that looked until the last minute to be queuing up Obama's chosen successor?
None of it makes sense. That means we're never going to stop hearing about it.
But it doesn't need to make sense. Nor does there need to be any evidence for believers to hold tight.
