Fox News’ Sean Hannity appears to have fallen for a parody news website’s claim that 250,000 Middle Eastern refugees will be settled in the United States, according to a noted fact-checker.
“You see the backlash emerging now in Europe over the refugee problem from Syria and Iraq,” the cable news anchor said in an Oct. 19 interview with 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, referring to the mass of refugees who’ve fled the terrors of the Syrian civil war and the Islamic State. “The president said he’s going to bring in 250,000 refugees into this country. My fear is, and our national intelligence director James Clapper said, that ISIS in Iraq will infiltrate the refugee population.”
“If that’s the case, I don’t think we can risk taking one refugee in, although we can help probably on a humanitarian basis,” he added.
Bush responded by saying he’d, “never heard that, and that would be impossible to imagine logistically for us to screen.”
There’s a good reason why the former Florida governor was unfamiliar with Hannity’s claim: The quoted figure doesn’t appear to be grounded in reality.
The closest that anyone has come to reporting the number cited by Hannity is a Sep. 20 article by the Associated Press, titled “Kerry: US to accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, 100,000 in 2017.”
“The U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees from around the world next year, up from 70,000, and that total would rise to 100,000 in 2017,” the AP reported, citing remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry. “The White House had previously announced it intended to take in 10,000 additional Syrian refugees over the next year.”
“Even if the U.S. took in 30,000 Syrians over the next two years — an unlikely outcome, given that only 1,500 have been admitted since the start of the war — that number would pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands that Germany is expected to accept,” the AP added, “or the 800,000 Vietnamese that the U.S. resettled in the years after the Vietnam war.”
Hannity’s estimate goes beyond what the AP reported.
The 250,000 number referenced by Hannity appears to have originated at a fake news website called Real News Right Now, according to PunditFact, which is a subset of the Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact.
“U.S. to House 250,000 Syrian Refugees at Navajo, Standing Rock Indian Reservations,” the parody website declared in September.
The satirical report also claimed that a supposed State Department official said that, “the tribal leadership of the Navajo and Standing Rock territories respectively, will hold sole responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of the refugees.”
“Due in part to shared experiences, we believe Syrian refugees will find it relatively easy to assimilate themselves into the native culture,” said the apparently non-existent spokeswoman.
The article’s author, R. Hobbus R.D., claims to be an “independent investigative journalist” specializing in “international politics, health, business, science, conflict resolution, history, geography, mathematics, social issues, feminism, space travel, civil rights, human rights, animal rights, fashion, film, astronomy, classic literature, religion, biology, paranormal activity, the occult, physics, psychology, and creative writing.”
He also claims to have appeared in multiple publications, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, Playboy, The Economist, The New York Times, Mad Magazine, Hustler, Guns & Ammo, People, Maxim Magazine, Highlights, The 9/11 Commission Report, The New Yorker, Bon Appetite, Rolling Stone, Car & Driver, Soldier of Fortune, Elle, Nintendo Power and National Geographic.
Hobbus is also the supposed recipient of several journalism awards, including “the prestigious Stephen Glass Distinction in Journalistic Integrity (2011), The Oscar Mayer Award for Journalistic Excellence (2003), three Nobel Peace Prize nominations, one Pulitzer in Investigative Reporting (1998), and two Pulitzer Prizes in Commentary (1996, 2008).”
Other stories featured on Real News Right Now include, “Pyongyang to Host 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos,” “ISIS Launches Change.org Petition to Replace ‘Behead’ With ‘Dehead,'” “Starbucks Opens Five Stores in Jordan’s 2nd Largest Refugee Camp” and “Obama Honors Pope Francis with Christening of Next-Generation Combat Drone.”
Hannity repeated the 250,000 number again on Oct. 20 in an interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The real estate mogul went on to parrot Hannity’s figure during an Oct. 26 townhall meeting in New Hampshire.
The Migration Policy Institute, which tracks immigration trends all over the world, said it had no idea where Hannity gets his number.
“We are not aware of any suggestion that the United States would seek to resettle 250,000 refugees from Syria or Iraq,” the group’s director of communications, Michelle Mittelstadt, told PunditFact.
The fact-checker, which awarded the Fox host a “pants on fire” rating, added, “Long story short, while we don’t know where Hannity got his number, it appears someone fell for a hoax from a fake news website.”
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UPDATE 10.28.15: Hannity responded Tuesday evening to claims he fell for a parody website, accusing PunditFact of being party to a liberal conspiracy to undermine his credibility:
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
“I don’t normally spend my time, waste my time responding to stupidity from liberal websites that spend their days attacking me,” he said, explaining that he got to 250,000 by adding figures from the Sept. 20 AP article to his own personal calculations.
“So, PolitiFact, to use your own words: Liar, liar, your pants on fire,” he added.
This story has been updated to include details of the AP’s original reporting on the refugee crisis.
