Look at the front page of the Drudge Report on Monday — 35 days before the presidential election — and the top headline baselessly alleges Bill Clinton, spouse of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, has a secret son, Danney Williams.
Drudge Report is spreading a conspiracy about Bill Clinton it debunked in 1999
It’s an unfounded rumor that dates back to 1992, when a tabloid published a story saying Clinton fathered Williams with an Arkansas prostitute. The story was debunked in 1999 — by none other than the Drudge Report itself — when a paternity test proved Clinton was not Williams’s father.
Accuracy in Media, a right-leaning media watch dog site, published the Drudge Report’s scoop in 1999:
A claim by Bobbie Ann Williams, a Little Rock prostitute, that her son, Danny, was fathered by Bill Clinton has been proven false by DNA analysis. Star, the tabloid that first published Gennifer Flowers’s claim that she had been one of Clinton’s lovers, was reported to have paid Williams “a low six-figure” sum for exclusive rights to the story. It arranged to have Danny’s DNA checked against that of the President. On January 9, the Drudge Report broke the news that Time magazine had learned that the DNA tests cleared Clinton.
But with Clinton continuing her lead in the polls and a poor debate performance from Republican nominee Donald Trump, right-wing sites seem like they are reaching. Trump publicly praised himself after the first presidential debate for not spilling the beans on Bill Clinton’s past infidelities — now the Drudge Report has resurfaced the false story about Clinton’s illegitimate son, with even more dubious sources.
The current headline links to Danney Williams’s Twitter account, which is dedicated to showing the facial similarities he has with Clinton, and a video of Roger Stone, a close Donald Trump ally, from January, claiming there never was a paternity test. This story was featured on Alex Jones’s Infowars — a site known for circulating baseless alt-right conspiracy theories.
While these claims, which have not been acknowledged by the Clinton campaign, are part of a long history of questioning the extent of Bill Clinton’s infidelity, this particular rumor also feeds into a new routine strategy, carried out by Trump and his supporters, of raising otherwise baseless rumors to mainstream awareness.
Trump and his supporters have a habit of drumming up baseless controversies
Trump and his supporters have made a habit of repeating rumors about his political opponents.
This past year, Trump has repeatedly insinuated that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in JFK’s assassination. After the shooting in Orlando, he implied that Obama had deeper ties to terrorists than the American public is aware of. Seemingly apropos of nothing, Trump reignited conspiracies that there was something “fishy” about the suicide of Bill Clinton’s close friend and former White House counsel Vince Foster. He spread a fake controversy that Clinton’s emails had something to do with the Iranian government’s execution of a nuclear scientist and propped up baseless claims that Clinton was dying of some kind of brain disease (she had a mild form of pneumonia).
Encouraged by Trump’s insinuations, and by conservative websites and chatrooms, there is a “growing swath of people who occupied the fringes of American politics but [are] increasingly becoming part of the mainstream,” the Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen aptly conveyed in a profile of a Trump supporter.
These are voters like the subject of McCrummen’s profile, who “believed that President Obama was a Muslim. And like so many she had gotten to know online through social media, she also believed that he was likely gay, that Michelle Obama could be a man, and that the Obama children were possibly kidnapped from a family now searching for them.”
All of this has presented a challenge for journalists, who have tried to figure out a way to cover one of the major party nominees without giving credence to these underlying falsehoods. When I interviewed fact-checking expert Lucas Graves about Trump earlier this year, he attributed this to the changing role of journalists in the information age:
Journalists are no longer gatekeepers in the way they were. Even a decade ago you could meaningfully speak of journalists being able to police to some extent the focus and nature of public discourse, and that is simply not true anymore. Since the 1990s, it has become easier for politicians to speak more directly to the voters, and it is easier for people to tailor their own media diet to their own preferences.
Trump and his supporters can effortlessly spread fake rumors about Bill Clinton’s alleged illegitimate child, just as they do baseless rumors about Hillary Clinton’s health.
(Hat tip to Justin Green for finding Drudge Report’s 1999 debunking of the Bill Clinton illegitimate child rumor.)
