The right-wing blogosphere is all a-twitter about MoveOn.org allegedly being suckered into publishing an article, allegedly authored by conservative columnist Walter Williams, saying that the Republicans had no chance of winning in 2012. In fact, as anyone who knew Walter Williams' background would at least strongly suspect, Walter Williams wrote no such article. But it also appears that MoveOn.org never published it.
A right-wing website called www.acnation.com (which stands for American Conservative NATION) got an email from another right-wing website called RiteOn.org (which HAD published the fake article), apologizing for being duped in this apparent April Fool's joke. Acnation.org even published the entire text of the apology, which reads as follows:
We owe Dr. Walter Williams an apology.
We published an article that we thought was written by him and we have subsequently found out it was not. The title of the article we published was “No Matter What” and it was published on April 1. Please be informed that this article was mistakenly attributed to Dr Williams.
We admire Dr. Williams work and the article we published was not written by him and was, in fact, a “phony” that fooled us also. We hope, by way of this explanation, to inform those who took the article as genuine to know that it was bogus and that Dr Williams had nothing to do with the writing of the article entitled “No Matter What” that appeared under the column entitled “A Bad Dream” published on the RiteOn web site on April 1.
We erred in not researching the real source of the article prior to publication and we erred in publishing it. We try within our means to avoid publishing phony material of the sort represented by this article and we are sorry we failed to catch the mistake prior to publication.
Chuck MacNab, Editor and Publisher, RiteOn.org
How do I know that RiteOn.org is in fact a right-wing website, rather than some kind of subsidiary of MoveOn.org? Well, I did a Google search on RiteOn.org, which blazons the following on its homepage, immediately below its name:
"AN INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE"
I've done a search, and can find no indication whatsoever that MoveOn.org had anything to do with this. Nevertheless, if you Google "MoveOn.org" and "Walter Williams," you get 33,600 hits, all of which on the first several pages attribute this apology to MoveOn.org, even though many of them post the full apology, with the actual name of the organization doing the apologizing. This thing has now gone viral. A right-wing guy even posted this alleged mistake (or worse) by MoveOn.org on a baseball blog on which I sometimes post. According to one right-wing website I saw, it's even made the Rush Lamebrain show.
It's truly amazing: To get these people to believe a smear on a liberal organization, all you have to do is post some made-up fact about it on a right-wing website, and even if you provide the evidence that the smear is false right in the text of the smear itself, your right-wing audience is completely willing to believe that the smear is true.