Faux Nooz spreads information from hoax website
http://fair.org/home/the-fake-news-food-chain/
Media Matters Brendan Karet (10/27/15) had a good catch today on how fake news enters the media food chain. His example started with Fox News Sean Hannity (10/19/15) telling Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush that the president said hes going to bring in 250,000 refugees into this country.
The next day, Hannity (10/20/15) gave the same statistic to candidate Donald Trump:
This president has committed to nearly 250,000 coming to America. That tells me werewe have a pre-9/11 mindset again.
What was Hannitys source for this remarkable claim? PolitiFact (10/26/15) looked into it, and could find only one possible source: the joke website Real News Right Now, which featured that story in September, along with reports like Vatican City Conducts Successful Nuclear Test and Joe the Plumber Caught Trying to Enter North Korea.
The same day PolitiFact was pointing out that Hannitys claim derived from a hoax website, Trump was offering it to NBCs Matt Lauer at a televised town hall (10/26/15) as a reason to be fearful about immigration:
We have a president that said 3,000, then it was 5,000, then it was 10,000now he wants to bring in 250,000 people, who nobody even knows who they are, other thanand I watched the migration very carefully. Theyre young, strong men. I keep saying Where are the women, where are the children? You dont see that many women, you dont see that many children. Now were going to take in 250,000 people, theyre coming from areas we dont know. They have no papers, no documentsthis could be the greatest Trojan horse, it probably isnt. But this could be the greatest Trojan horse of all time.
This progressionfrom hoax site to Fox News to Donald Trump to NBCs mainstream audienceresembled the path taken by Foxs claim that hundreds of Cuban troops were secretly in Syria (FAIR Blog, 10/21/15).
In that case, Fox seemed to manufacture its own disinformation, based on a flimsy claim by a right-wing think tank in Miami. Another GOP hopeful, Ted Cruz, delivered Foxs phantom fact to NBC News, telling Meet the Presss Chuck Todd (10/18/15), Therere a couple hundred Cubans right now with a major Cuban general fighting in the Syrian civil war.