CRISTINA LOPEZ: So just to throw the five examples that we talked about, one of them became really relevant yesterday because we were talking about how Fox News host Sean Hannity repeatedly fed his audience a lie that Seth Rich, who was a DNC (Democratic National Committee) staffer that was murdered last year in D.C., he continuously fed the narrative to his audience that he was tied to Wikileaks, that he had been the contact that provided WikiLeaks with the 20,000 hacked emails and in that way what he was trying to do was distract from the obvious ties of the Trump administration to Russia. So the effort to push this lie, it wasn't just to push an agenda a right-wing agenda. It was also to let the Trump administration off the hook by just distracting from the fact and trying to kill the Russia narrative that has been so damaging to the Trump administration And in a way it all came full circle yesterday when a lawsuit filed against Fox News. The lawsuit was filed by one of the persons they were relying on to kind of prove this story showing that the story had been planted. And it's a story that has been moving around right-wing media on the internet, and just Hannity became kind of the mouthpiece that brought on let's say a more mainstream format like Fox News.



Other lies -- and this one had repercussions, like real life repercussions, was the lie that Infowars host Alex Jones made really popular and that now has become better known with the nickname of “Pizzagate.” It was this rumor that started also like in the right-wing corners of the internet that was trying to create the conspiracy that there was a pedophilia ring and that it was hiding in the basement of this family restaurant here in Washington, D.C. And it was Alex Jones who said on his show that people should self-investigate this matter because he was sure they were happening and we all know how that ended. You had an armed --



CHARLES SHOWALTER (HOST): Wacko comes in with a gun and shoots up the place.



LOPEZ: Exactly. And so these lies have serious consequences the minute they leave the right-wing bubble and the minute they become a fact of real life. And this is more for humor, and we can talk about Rush Limbaugh not believing that NASA actually found water on Mars.



[...]



LOPEZ: This one has real consequences too. And this was advanced by Fox, and is often advanced by Fox, but this particular instance it was advanced by Fox & Friends, which we all know is one of the most powerful shows on television because of one the persons that we know religiously watches it -- the president we know watches the show every day. And on this show, it was presented [as] fact that many undocumented immigrants had voted in the last-- in the presidential elections. And that's not only [irresponsible] and baseless, its also part of the agenda to attempt to disenfranchise like an enormous part of the population just by using undocumented immigrants as scapegoats. In reality, there are like several studies where experts can agree that the rate of voter fraud in the U.S. is really close to zero, and in fact like the cases that we do know about are very very few and the case that we know about show that the system works, because they get caught. And in reality any time that there have been instances of noncitizens actually voting, they have been very very low, and more connected to them not really knowing about their eligibility than actually with the intent of pursuing mass-scale voter fraud.



And finally this one was really easy to debunk, but didn't make a difference in terms of what right-wing media believed in terms of what affects it has inside of the bubble. Earlier this year Breitbart reported a story that a thousand-man deep mob had attacked police, they had set a German church on fire, and this was part of their agenda of creating anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Muslim sentiment specifically because there were some chants supposedly that were Muslim and what they wanted to do was create this fear that this Muslim mob was pretty much torching a German church on fire. And then it had to be the police and local reporters who said, “Well that never happened.”There were people on the street that were celebrating the new year, there was a firework and -- a scaffolding like close to the church kind of got lit for a second with a firework and people were celebrating out in the street. There was never a mob, there was never an attack on a church, but this is how Breitbart presented it, and they triumphantly were claiming that the outlets debunking the story were just confirming it, twisting the truth so that it favored their agenda, and this is something that we see all the time.

Related:

BillMoyers.com: Five lies that are ricocheting around the right-wing media bubble

Previously: 

Trump administration met with a GOP donor and a Fox contributor about a fake story meant to distract from Russia probe 

It’s fake news, but its impact on people has been real 

Breitbart story about “mob” of 1,000 Muslims attacking a German church reportedly dissolves