The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

The papal endorsement was the biggest “fake news” story of the election cycle, but it was hardly an outlier. An analysis by Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed News found that the top twenty fake news stories in the three months before the election were shared or liked a total of 8.7 million times on Facebook. Over the same period, the top twenty news stories from reputable sources got only 7.3 million Facebook shares or likes. In another study, economists Hunt Allcott at New York University and Matthew Gentzkow at Stanford compiled a database of 115 pro-Trump and 41 pro-Clinton fake news stories that, together, were shared 38 million times in the weeks before the election. These shares, they estimated, led to hundreds of millions of click-throughs. They also produced a list of fake news sites that, together, had 159 million visits between October 8 and November 8.

The persistence and spread of belief in the Vegetable Lamb was ultimately a harmless historical curiosity. But today’s Vegetable Lambs have become a major political force not only in the US but also in the UK and in Europe.15 Nearly a billion people live in the United States and the European Union (EU), and billions more are affected by the military, trade, and immigration policies of those nations. Whatever one thinks about the merits of Trump’s election, or of the UK’s exit from the EU (“Brexit”), it is profoundly troubling to think that these momentous political events were underwritten by falsehoods. And it raises a deep and unsettling question: Can democracy survive in an age of fake news?

This may sound like a truism, but it is worth saying: Our beliefs about the world matter.

If you believe false things about the world, and you make decisions on the basis of those beliefs, then those decisions are unlikely to yield the outcomes you expect and desire.

The ability to share information and influence one another’s beliefs is part of what makes humans special. It allows for science and art—indeed, culture of any sort.

Ultimately, what explains the persistence of the Vegetable Lamb in medieval texts has nothing to do with botany or the natural world. It was a purely social phenomenon. In thinking about Vegetable Lambs and fake news, we need to understand the social character of belief—and recognize that widespread falsehood is a necessary, but harmful, corollary to our most powerful tools for learning truths.

Political propaganda, however, is just part of the problem. Often more dangerous—because we are less attuned to it—is industrial propaganda. This runs the gamut from advertising, which is explicitly intended to influence beliefs, to concerted misinformation campaigns designed to undermine reliable evidence.

It is only through a proper understanding of these social effects that one can fully understand how false beliefs with significant, real-world consequences persist, even in the face of evidence of their falsehood. And during an era when fake news can dominate real news and influence elections and policy, this sort of understanding is a necessary step toward crafting a successful response. In part, our argument draws on historical (and recent) examples of false beliefs that have spread through communities of people trying to learn about the world.

In other words, scientists are the closest we have to ideal inquirers. For these reasons, the fact that even communities of scientists can persist in false beliefs is striking—and if even scientists are influenced by social factors, surely the rest of us are as well.

Our ability to successfully evaluate evidence and form true beliefs has as much to do with our social conditions as our individual psychology.

Over the past two decades, influential figures in American and British public life have adopted an ever-more-tenuous connection to the truth—and a complete disregard for evidence, expert knowledge, or logical coherence—with no political consequences.

There is, of course, no silver bullet for preventing the spread of lies and misinformation. We think the interventions most likely to succeed involve radical and unlikely changes, such as the development of new regulatory frameworks to penalize the intentional creation and distribution of fake news, similar to laws recently adopted in Germany to control hate speech on social media.33 And perhaps even more is needed—up to and including a reengineering of our basic democratic institutions. Given the scant possibility (and the risks) of such changes, we point to ways in which journalists and social media firms—and each of us individually—can limit the spread of misinformation without needing to limit speech. We all want to avoid becoming unwitting propagandists for someone else’s interests.

It turned out, then, that the satellite data were consistent with the BAS data after all—and that NASA had missed the ozone hole precisely because it was so far outside the range of what anyone believed possible. The ozone hole appeared to be real, and ozone depletion was not under control as everyone had thought.

The complex systems that enable life on our planet turned out to be perilously fragile.

The nations of the world had acted definitively and with conviction. And they had done so on the basis of sound and exhaustive science. In the end, our scientific process did the best thing we could ask of it: it saved us all from space radiation.

As a scientific consensus emerged during the middle part of the 1970s that CFCs posed a serious risk to ozone levels, and US policy makers began to implement regulatory responses, the chemical industry pushed back. Led by DuPont, the massive American chemical manufacturer, industry representatives argued against doing anything. They sang a common refrain: it was too soon to act, because there was still too much uncertainty. DuPont placed ads in newspapers and magazines across the country, arguing that “there is no persuasive evidence” in favor of the Rowland-Molina claims that CFCs contributed to ozone depletion and asking, “Should an industry be prejudged and useful fluorocarbon products be destroyed before any answers are found?” Likewise, a 1975 op-ed piece in the industry magazine Chemical Week claimed, of the role of CFCs in ozone depletion, that “we’re talking about a basically unknown effect on a little-understood phenomenon brought on by a debatable cause,” and went on to conclude: “One fact is clear: We don’t have the facts. We don’t even know for sure whether there is a problem.”

Indeed, as we have seen, the 1980s would reveal that the scientific consensus of the 1970s had been deeply flawed: the danger was far greater than anyone had understood! The problem was that the industry continued to call for more research, and for delayed action, irrespective of how much evidence came in. As late as March 1988, after the BAS findings showed the presence of the ozone hole, after Stolarski’s review of the NASA satellite data confirmed the BAS data, and after the 1986 and 1987 Antarctic expeditions provided direct detections of by-products of CFC interactions with ozone, the CEO of DuPont wrote to the US Senate to declare that there was no need for drastic reductions.15 By this point, it was hard to imagine what further evidence you could ask for. And yet the industry kept asking for more—for certainty.

Philosophers of science, such as Larry Laudan and P. Kyle Stanford, have argued that these past failures of science should make us very cautious in accepting current scientific theories as true. Their argument is sometimes called the “pessimistic meta-induction”: a careful look at the long history of scientific error should make us confident that current theories are also erroneous.19 Does this mean that industry critics of the scientific consensus on CFCs and ozone had a point? Scientists did not (could not) have enough evidence to be certain—and science has had such a dismal track record of discovering lasting truths that we can hardly take the scientists’ word if they say they have gotten it right this time. Surely caution about accepting new scientific findings is always in order. Not quite. Perhaps we can never be certain about anything, but that does not mean we cannot be more or less confident—or that we cannot gather evidence and use it to make informed decisions. We might, for instance, become very, very confident that CFCs are creating a hole in our ozone layer. With the right sorts of evidence we might become so confident that the line between this sort of evidentially grounded belief and absolute certainty is, for our purposes, meaningless. Ultimately, we care about truth (at least scientific truth) inasmuch as true beliefs allow us to act successfully in the world. We care about knowledge because of the role that what we know—or at least, what we strongly beli...

As Hume himself put it, “A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence.”

And on reflection, although scientists have come to reject many past theories, it remains true that those theories were often highly effective within the contexts that they had been developed and tested. The old earth-centered model of the solar system was supremely accurate for predicting the locations of stars and planets. We still use Newton’s law of gravity to calculate satellite trajectories—and Newton’s theory sufficed to get us to the moon. In other words, we make our beliefs as good as we can on the basis of the evidence we have, and, often enough, things work out.

It is true that, like all of us, scientists cannot isolate themselves from their cultural contexts. These contexts can surely lead to biases and blind spots. Sometimes the conclusions scientists draw in the grips of their own biases have been socially unacceptable, morally bankrupt, or just wrong, and yet were widely accepted nonetheless.34 So it is true that we need to be aware of and sophisticated about how social and political factors may influence science—and it is for this reason that the sorts of cultural critiques of science emerging from science studies can and have been deeply valuable. But the mere observation that a scientist or group of scientists holds certain cultural or political views does not undermine the evidence and arguments they produce to support those views.

The expression “acid rain” was first coined in 1859 by Robert Angus, a British pharmacist working in Manchester.39 Angus, who was studying sources of air pollution, found that the rain near industrial sites tended to be more acidic than that near the coasts, where there was less pollution. He attributed this effect to an early industrial technique known as the Leblanc soda process, which was known to release hydrochloric acid. Angus’s research showed that rather than merely dissipate in the atmosphere, that acid tended to fall back to earth as acid rain. As the Laki eruption demonstrates, the basic phenomenon of acid rain had already been rather dramatically observed. Angus’s work showed that acid rain could also be a by-product of human activity. The British Parliament reacted quickly, implementing the Alkali Act in 1864, which required Leblanc process plants to prevent the acid from being released into the atmosphere. It was a remarkable early act of environmental regulation.

Likens and Bormann’s conclusions were startling because they showed that even remote areas, far from industrial centers, were deeply affected by human activity and pollution. It seemed that sulfur and other chemicals released by power plants in the Ohio Valley were drifting over the entire Northeast before falling to the ground as acid rain. These findings were consonant with similar results in southern Sweden and in Norway, where acid rain was likewise observed far from industrial settings. (In this case, it seemed the pollution was coming from England and Germany.) Acid rain due to sources in the United States was soon detected in Canada. Long-distance pollution and acid rain were rapidly becoming not just an environmental problem, but a matter of international relations.

But while these initiatives were started under the Carter Administration, the job of developing a full regulatory framework fell to Ronald Reagan, who became president of the United States on January 20, 1981. And despite the large body of evidence concerning the causes and harms of acid rain, the Reagan Administration did everything it could to prevent action—up to and including tampering with the scientific record.

In the end, no legislation on acid rain was seriously considered for five more years, until after Reagan had left the White House. When Sherwood Rowland won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on CFCs and ozone, Fred Singer wrote an op-ed piece criticizing the Nobel committee: “In awarding the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the originators of the stratospheric ozone depletion hypothesis, the Swedish Academy has chosen to make a political statement.”51 This critique echoed the earlier industry arguments that, by advocating for new regulations on the basis of his work on CFCs, Rowland had become a political agent rather than a “true scientist.” The irony here is deep. Even if we grant—as we surely must—that Rowland’s work was influenced in various ways by his political and cultural contexts, there is a huge difference between speaking out about the socially relevant consequences of one’s own scientific research, as Rowland did following his 1974 paper, and working in direct consultation with the White House to undermine a scientific panel’s findings.

In the early 2000s, it was already widely known that some fish contained mercury. Coal-fired power plants emitted a form of inorganic mercury into the air, where it would gradually fall back to earth, mix into ocean water, and be ingested by microbes, which converted it to highly toxic methylmercury. These microbes would then be consumed by small fish, which would be consumed by larger fish, and so on up the food chain. Methylmercury tends to accumulate in animal tissue, so large fish were building up high levels of the toxin. This was why the FDA already had guidelines regulating the level of methylmercury in fish sold commercially—levels that, it turned out, were exceeded by some supermarket supplies.

Later, Marshall managed to isolate and cultivate the new strain, showing definitively that bacteria could live in the human stomach after all. Even with these strong results, Warren and Marshall faced significant skepticism. The acid theory was widely held and deeply ingrained. The resistance was so strong that Marshall resorted to dramatic stunts to attract attention—and adherents—to their theory. In a fit of pique, he apparently drank a petri dish full of H. pylori himself and then successfully treated the ensuing ulcer with antibiotics.

One of the most startling findings from the Bala-Goyal models is just how strongly people’s beliefs can influence one another.

Two months later, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other nationalist and nativist extremists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying torches and chanting anti-Semitic, racist, and pro-Trump slogans.50 Violence broke out between the “Unite the Right” crowd and counterprotesters, injuring fourteen people. The following day, a twenty-year-old white supremacist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a counterprotest. He injured nineteen people and killed a thirty-two-year-old woman named Heather Heyer. In the month before the attack he reportedly had posted photos of Nazis, swastikas, and pro-Trump memes on his Facebook page, as well as pictures of alt-right icons such as Pepe the Frog.51 The term “polarization” originated in physics to describe the way some electromagnetic waves propagate in two oppositely oriented ways. By the mid-nineteenth century, political pundits had embraced this metaphor, of two opposite ways of being, to describe disagreements in a state dominated by two parties. Today it captures the broad sense that Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Tories, left-wing and right-wing, are increasingly divided in their beliefs and moral stances.

But instead, his fellow physicians—principally upper-class gentlemen—were offended by the implication that their hands were unclean, and they questioned the scientific basis of his “cadaverous particles,” which did not accord with their theories of disease. Shortly thereafter Semmelweis was replaced at the Vienna General Hospital. In his new position, at a small hospital in Budapest, his methods brought the death rate from childbed fever down to less than 1 percent. Over the remaining eighteen years of his life, Semmelweis’s revolutionary techniques languished. He grew increasingly frustrated with the medical establishment and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown. He was beaten by guards at a Viennese mental hospital and died of blood poisoning two weeks later, at the age of forty-two. Semmelweis was right about the connection between autopsies and puerperal fever, and the decisions he made on this basis had meaningful consequences. He saved the lives of thousands of infants and women. But his ideas could have saved many more lives if he had been able to convince others of what he knew. In this case, although he communicated his beliefs to other scientists and provided as much evidence as they could possibly desire, his ideas were still rejected, at great cost. The warrantless belief persisted that gentlemen could not communicate disease via contact.

In his first White House press conference, Sean Spicer, then the Trump Administration press secretary, declared that Trump had had the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” But counts of Washington, D.C., Metro ridership and crowd estimates based on overhead photographs seemed to definitively show that Spicer’s claim was bogus.62 Several media outlets reported that the attendance was underwhelming compared with the previous two inaugurations of Barack Obama, let alone the massive Women’s March in Washington protesting the administration, which occurred the following day. Very quickly the White House’s denial of basic facts became the story.63 Political scientist Brian Schaffner and pollster Samantha Luks conducted a study of this incident.64 They showed almost fourteen hundred American adults photos of two inauguration crowds side by side. They then asked half of the survey participants which photo was from Trump’s inauguration and which from Obama’s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more Trump supporters than Hillary Clinton supporters falsely identified the more crowded photo as from the Trump inauguration. The other half of study participants were asked a different, presumably easier question: which photo had more people? The shocking result was that 15 percent of Trump supporters chose the photo with the clearly smaller crowd.

In 1951, a psychologist at Swarthmore College named Solomon Asch devised a now-classic experiment.65 He showed groups of eight participants a card with one line on the left and three lines of varying length on the right (figure 5). Their task was to identify which line on the right was as long as the line on the left. Unbeknownst to his subjects, seven members of the group were confederates who were all instructed to choose the same wrong line. For example, in figure 5, they might all, incorrectly, choose c instead of a. The subject, made to answer last, then had a choice: he or she could either agree with the rest of the group and pick c, or pick the correct line a. More than a third of study participants agreed with the others in the group. They chose to go against the evidence of their own senses in order to conform with what the others in the group did.

There is no doubt that Semmelweis’s hand-washing practice had dramatic real-world consequences—so it might seem surprising that physicians nonetheless conformed rather than try the promising new practice. But notice that the physicians themselves were not the ones at risk of death. Neither were their friends, relatives, or members of their social circles, as the patients in their clinics were generally poor. If the consequences of their choices were more personal, they might have ignored the reputational risks of admitting that their hands were unclean and listened to Semmelweis. Likewise, if we offered Trump supporters one thousand dollars to choose the photo with more people in it, more of them might get it right. (Relatedly, social psychologists have shown that when monetary incentives are offered to those who get the correct answer in the Asch test, conformity is less prevalent.)

There are powerful forces in the world whose interests depend on public opinion and who manipulate the social mechanisms we have just described to further their own agendas.

Soon more evidence came in. During the summer of 1953, a group of doctors at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital completed a study in which they painted mice with cigarette tar. The mice reliably developed malignant carcinomas.3 Their paper provided a direct and visceral causal link between a known by-product of smoking and fatal cancer, where previous studies had shown only statistical relationships. It produced a media frenzy, with articles appearing in national and international newspapers and magazines. (Time magazine ran the story under the title “Beyond Any Doubt.”)4 That December, four more studies bolstering the case were presented at a research meeting in New York; one doctor told the New York Times that “the male population of the United States will be decimated by cancer of the lung in another fifty years if cigarette smoking increases as it has in the past.”5 The bad press had immediate consequences. The day after it reported on the December research meeting, the Times ran an article contending that a massive sell-off in tobacco stocks could be traced to the recent coverage. The industry saw three consecutive quarters of decline in cigarette purchases, beginning shortly after the Reader’s Digest article.6 (This decline had followed nineteen consecutive quarters of record sales.) As National Institutes of Health statistician Harold Dorn would write in 1954, “Two years ago cancer of the lung was an unfamiliar and little discussed disease outside the pages of medica...

Of course, smoking does cause lung cancer—and also cancers of the mouth and throat, heart disease, emphysema, and dozens of other serious illnesses. It would be impossible, using any legitimate scientific method, to generate a robust and convincing body of evidence demonstrating that smoking is safe. But that was not the goal. The goal was rather to create the appearance of uncertainty: to find, fund, and promote research that muddied the waters, made the existing evidence seems less definitive, and gave policy makers and tobacco users just enough cover to ignore the scientific consensus. As a tobacco company executive put it in an unsigned memo fifteen years later: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public.”

The term “propaganda” originated in the early seventeenth century, when Pope Gregory XV established the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide—the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The Congregation was charged with spreading Roman Catholicism through missionary work across the world and, closer to home, in heavily Protestant regions of Europe. (Today the same body is called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.) Politics and religion were deeply intertwined in seventeenth-century Europe, with major alliances and even empires structured around theological divides between Catholics and Protestants.15 The Congregation’s activities within Europe were more than religious evangelization: they amounted to political subversion, promoting the interests of France, Spain, and the southern states of the Holy Roman Empire in the Protestant strongholds of northern Europe and Great Britain. It was this political aspect of the Catholic Church’s activities that led to the current meaning of propaganda as the systematic, often biased, spread of information for political ends.

One member of the group later described its activities as “psychological warfare.”

In a series of books in the 1920s, including Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), CPI veteran Edward Bernays synthesized results from the social sciences and psychology to develop a general theory of mass manipulation of public opinion—for political purposes, but also for commerce. Bernays’s postwar work scarcely distinguished between the political and commercial. One of his most famous campaigns was to rebrand cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” a symbol of women’s liberation, with the goal of breaking down social taboos against women’s smoking and thus doubling the market for tobacco products. In 1929, under contract with the American Tobacco Company, makers of Lucky Strike cigarettes, he paid women to smoke while marching in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York. The idea that industry—including tobacco, sugar, corn, healthcare, energy, pest control, firearms, and many others—is engaged in propaganda, far beyond advertising and including influence and information campaigns addressed at manipulating scientific research, legislation, political discourse, and public understanding, can be startling and deeply troubling.

Did (or do) you believe that fat is unhealthy—and the main contributor to obesity and heart disease? The sugar industry invested heavily in supporting and promoting research on the health risks of fat, to deflect attention from the greater risks of sugar.19 Who is behind the long-term resistance to legalizing marijuana for recreational use? Many interests are involved, but alcohol trade groups have taken a particularly strong and effective stand.

He writes, for instance, that “those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Despite strong evidence of the link between smoking and cancer by the early 1950s, the Surgeon General did not issue a statement linking smoking to health risks until 1964—a decade after the TIRC was formed.23 The following year, Congress passed a bill requiring a health warning on tobacco products. But it was not until 1970 that cigarette advertising was curtailed at the federal level, and not until 1992 that the sale of tobacco products to minors was prohibited.

Indeed, as we noted, the industry’s own scientists appear to have been convinced that smoking causes cancer as early as the 1950s—and yet the results of those studies remained hidden for decades, until they were revealed through legal action in the 1990s. In other words, industry scientists were not only producing studies showing that smoking was safe, but when their studies linked tobacco and cancer, they buried them.

For instance, it is perhaps unsurprising that industrial propagandists are less effective when policy makers are otherwise well-informed. The more scientists the policy makers are connected to, the greater the chance that they get enough evidence to lead them to the true theory. If we imagine a community of doctors who scour the medical literature for the dangers of tobacco smoke, we might expect them to be relatively unmoved by the TIRC’s work. On the other hand, when policy makers have few independent connections to the scientific community, they are highly vulnerable to outside influence.

In 2017, a tight-knit Somali-American community in Minnesota experienced the state’s worst measles outbreak since the 1980s.85 After learning that rates of severe autism were particularly high in this group, anti-vaccine advocates posted fliers and ads throughout the Somali community center cautioning against vaccination. They also distributed pamphlets at community health meetings. Andrew Wakefield, the scientist who infamously, and falsely, first reported a link between vaccines and autism, visited Minneapolis repeatedly in 2010 and 2011 to talk with Somali parents of autistic children.86 As a result of these efforts, vaccination rates in the community dropped from 92 percent in 2004 to 42 percent in 2014, precipitating the measles outbreak. Even after the outbreak, the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, an anti-vaccine organization, doubled down, hosting events and spreading misinformation about MMR vaccines and autism. There have even been reports of anti-vaxxers going door to door to try to persuade people that the measles outbreak was actually caused by the Health Department, whose goal was to pressure Somalis into vaccinating their children! What we see here is anti-vaxxers peddling their beliefs—beliefs completely unsupported by evidence—to a close-knit group particularly susceptible to their message. In doing so, they take advantage of conformity effects.

On Sunday, December 4, 2016, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Edgar Maddison Welch told his wife and two daughters that he had some business to attend to and left the house.1 He got into his car and drove about six hours from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina, to a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. He carried with him an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a handgun, and a shotgun, all loaded. When he arrived at the restaurant at about 3 p.m., he entered carrying the AR-15 and opened fire, unloading multiple rounds into a locked door inside the establishment. Welch thought he was a hero. He believed that the pizzeria, known as Comet Ping Pong, was the staging ground for an international child prostitution ring headed by none other than Hillary Clinton, the former Democratic nominee for president. Welch was there to investigate the pizza parlor—and if possible, save the children.

These amateur investigators soon came to believe that they had detected a code hidden in Podesta’s lunch orders. Starting from “cheese pizza,” which has the same initials as “child prostitution,” they created a translation manual: “hotdog” meant “boy,” “pasta” meant “little boy,” “sauce” meant “orgy,” and so on.4 A discussion board soon appeared on the website Reddit with the title “Pizzagate,” where these allegations were discussed and new “evidence” was brought to bear; other discussions continued on websites popular with right-wing youths, such as 4chan. In a particularly baffling inference, this community somehow reasoned that since pizza-related terms were involved in their “code,” the prostitution ring must be run out of a pizzeria. (Yes, a real pizzeria—that one was not code!) Soon they identified a location: D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong, which was owned by a man with links to the Clintons (he had previously dated the CEO of pro-Clinton media watchdog Media Matters for America) and which Podesta was known to frequent. (Their investigation also determined that Podesta practiced witchcraft and drank the blood of his human victims.) These bizarre and evidence-free allegations soon spread beyond the dark underbelly of the internet to relatively mainstream rightwing media such as the Drudge Report and Infowars.

Information posted and widely shared on Facebook and Twitter has the capacity to reach huge proportions of the voting public in the United States and other Western democracies. Even if fake news is not new, it can now spread as never before. This makes it far more dangerous.

The story got a further boost in May 2017 when Fox News and several Fox affiliates ran stories in which it was claimed that the hacked DNC emails had been discovered, by the FBI, on Rich’s computer.40 These allegations were attributed to a man named Rod Wheeler, a former Washington, D.C., homicide detective who had been paid to work on the Rich case by a Republican insider. Wheeler talked as if he had himself seen the messages on Rich’s computer and could speak directly to this new evidence. There was only one problem: the Fox News story was completely fabricated. Shortly after it appeared, the FBI stated that it was not involved in the Rich investigation. Soon Wheeler admitted that he had not, after all, seen the emails on Rich’s computer.

About a week after first airing the stories, Fox and its affiliates retracted them; that August, Wheeler filed a lawsuit against Fox claiming that its reporters had knowingly fabricated quotations they attributed to him and that the entire story had been orchestrated in consultation with the White House.41 It seems that there is not, and never has been, any reason to believe that Rich had any involvement in the DNC email hack. Yet at least some right-wing media personalities, including Fox’s own Sean Hannity, have continued to repeat variations on these claims. Hannity, in particular, has refused to issue a retraction over the Wheeler remarks—even after Wheeler himself disavowed them.