How the Kremlin Penetrated Fox News and Right-Wing Media

Well in advance of the U.S. 2016 presidential election, the Kremlin employed a broad, coordinated influence operation across U.S. right-wing media. Its aim: to sow discord, promote Donald Trump, and damage Hillary Clinton.

The seeds of this effort began years earlier, shortly after Barack Obama was first inaugurated. The birther conspiracy had dogged Obama since he first ran for the presidency. Even after he released his short-form Hawaiian birth certificate in 2008, right-wing sites insisted it was a forgery and continued to harp on it ad nauseam. By 2010, birtherism had become a fixture on conservative blogs and forums.

In August 2009, a crank named Wayne Madsen appeared on Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda network that was then breaking into the U.S. market, to report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was behind the creation of the Obama "birther" movement — that is, the conspiracy theory that Obama was not a natural born American citizen and was therefore ineligible to serve as president.

By 2010, RT was running segment after segment promoting the notion that Obama was not born in the United States, aligning its messaging with an emerging right-wing blogosphere that was taking root in the United States. RT’s propaganda on this front was quite effective, not least because that year, it ranked among the top 10 most-viewed news and political channels of all time on YouTube.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/active-measures-how-the-kremlin-penetrated