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The e-mail rumor mill is run by conservatives

By Paul Farhi,November 17, 2011

President Obama's birth certificate that was released by the White… (/REUTERS )

Will Medicare premiums go up nearly 2¹/^₂t_imesover the next two years in order to pay for the health-care legislation signed by President Obama last year? Well, no, they won’t. But you might think an increase is coming if you read a chain e-mail that has spread across the country in the past few months. “Send this to all seniors that you know,” it says. “So they will know who’s throwing them under the bus.”

Will Americans be subjected to international gun-control laws under a new U.N. treaty signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton? Is the president honoring Jane Fonda as one of the “women of the century”? Was suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan an adviserto the Obama administration?

Like the Medicare story, these claims are demonstrably false, too. Nevertheless, they are popular on the thriving underground e-mail circuit, a carnival of nonsense whose star attractions have included the canard that Obama is a secret Muslim and variations on the “birther” claims about his origins.

Grass-roots whisper campaigns such as these predate the invention of the “send” button, of course. No one needed a Facebook page or an e-mail account to spread the word about Thomas Jefferson’s secret love child or Grover Cleveland’s out-of-wedlock offspring (both won elections despite the stories, which in Jefferson’s case were very likely true).

But it has become a truism that in their modern, Internet-driven form, these persistent narratives spread far faster and run deeper than ever. And they share an unexpected trait: Most of the time, Democrats (or liberals) are the ones under attack. Yes, George W. Bush had some whoppers told about him — such as his alleged scoffing that the French “don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur’ ” — but when it comes to generating and sustaining specious and shocking stories, there’s no contest. The majority of the junk comes from the right, aimed at the left.

We’re not talking here about verifiably inaccurate statements from the mouths of politicians and party leaders. There’s plenty of that from all sides. And almost all of those statements are out in the open, where they get called out relatively quickly by the opposition or the mainstream media.

Instead, it’s the sub rosa campaigns of vilification, the can-you-believe-this beauts that land periodically in your inbox from a trusted friend or relative amid the noise of every political season.

This sort of buzz occurs out of earshot of the news media. It gains rapid and broad circulation by being passed from hand to hand, from friend to relative to co-worker. Its power and credibility come from its source. Aunt Sally isn’t just some reporter or anchor; she’s a dear family member. You know her. She wouldn’t lie to you, would she?

Viral e-mails didn’t really come into widespread use until early in the last decade, says David Emery, who tracks urban legends for About.com. The first big target was a Democrat: presidential candidate John Kerry, subjected to wild claims about his wealth, his service in Vietnam and the supposed radical connections of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Nonpartisan debunkers such as FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, PolitiFact.com, Emery and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker have been chasing down these tales and dousing them like three-alarm fires for years. (There’s even a chain e-mail that paints Snopes as a liberal cover-up for the White House.) It’s often difficult for these myth-busters to say with certainty where a falsehood began. But the numbers are clear.

Of the 79 chain e-mails about national politics deemed false by PolitiFact since 2007, only four were aimed at Republicans. Almost all of the rest concern Obama or other Democrats. The claims range from daffy (the White House renaming Christmas trees as “holiday trees”) to serious (the health-care law granting all illegal immigrants free care).

Snopes turned up 46 viral e-mails regarding Bush during his eight years in office. By contrast, in just four years as a candidate and as president, Obama has been the subject of 100 such chain e-mails. The difference is not just in number but in kind: Twenty of the 46 Bush e-mails checked by Snopes turned out to be true, and many of these flattered or praised him. Only 10 e-mails about Obama have been true, and almost every one of them has been negative.

Emery estimates that more than 80 percent of the political e-mails that he’s vetted over the past decade were written from a conservative point of view. “The use of forwarded e-mail to spread [false information] around is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon,” he said.