Deconstructing the rightwing spin machine.

• Author: Lombardo, Cara

It was an astonishing claim: President Obama unilaterally decided that the United States was going to let in 250,000 refugees from Syria and other war-torn regions. This was what Sean Hannity told Fox News viewers on October 19 and 20, saying Obama "has committed to nearly 250,000 coming to America." Five days later, Donald Trump cited this figure in New Hampshire.

The claim, it turns out, is completely false.

The fact-checking outlet PolitiFact traced it back to what appears to be a hoax article on a rightwing website called RealNewsRightNow. The article attributed the figure to a "Cathy Pieper" at the State Department. "We could find no Cathy Pieper working for the State Department," PolitiFact reported.

Hannity responded to this report, saying he got his figure by totaling the number of refugees the United States would accept over the next three years. PolitiFact debunked this too: Those figures represent refugees from all countries, not just Syria and its surrounding areas, and the numbers are similar to previous years.

There's nothing new about false information spreading like wildfire, especially when news becomes a battle for the loudest soundbite. Following the Navy Yard shooting in 2013, far-right website Breitbart reported that guns are banned on military bases, suggesting that laxer laws may have saved lives. The claim was repeated on Twitter by NRA member Ted Nugent and multiple Fox News contributors following the shooting. In fact, the rule does not ban all guns; one of the first Navy Yard victims was an armed security guard. The claim may have stemmed from a 2009 report in The Washington Times. But it was not true.

Many politicians snatch snippets of misinformation from websites and launch them into the media universe. They also take cues from pundits, gleefully stealing alarming one-liners and figures. Rightwing groups, in particular, bond over attacking the mainstream media--or what Marco Rubio calls the Democrats' "ultimate super PAC"--for missing the real stories.

The result is an eerie uniformity among rightwing media and candidates, even on matters where they're objectively wrong. This dangerous duo implants phony memes into the national dialect and ricochets falsehoods around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. But where does it begin?

Strategic fibbing has always accompanied politics. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president, a Connecticut newspaper cautioned that his victory would mean that "murder...