You got what you wanted--NPR did a story on Seth Rich

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During the presidential campaign, unfounded conspiracy theories regularly made their way from the fringes into mainstream news reports. That problem has not gone away. Last July, a 27-year-old staffer for the Democratic National Committee was shot to death here in Washington. D.C. police say it was a botched robbery.

That has not stopped a runaway conspiracy theory that Seth Rich's death was an assassination, that Rich gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks and was killed to cover it up. The outlets pushing this narrative without evidence include Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke about it yesterday morning.

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HAPIRO: Can we just start with a simple fact check of Gingrich's remark that nothing serious has been done to investigate Rich's murder? Is that true?

WEIGEL: That's not true. Police have investigated this, and unfortunately it is one of the many unsolved murders in D.C. right now. It's one of the many unsolved crimes in the neighborhood of Bloomingdale.

SHAPIRO: You've mapped out how this story moved from the fringes to the mainstream. It's a complicated journey. But in a nutshell, how did this happen?

WEIGEL: Well, it really began as soon as Rich was killed. There were questions on the Internet. And what pushed it into the next level was Julian Assange of WikiLeaks doing a very meandering interview with a Dutch TV station where he, to paraphrase him, said our sources take precautions. For example, there's this man Seth Rich in D.C. who was killed. The interviewer pressed if that meant Seth Rich was a source. Assange would not say yes. And that is what Assange has done since then.

What happened over the last week is that first FOX 5, a local Fox affiliate in D.C., said it had new information on the case that literally was based on one interview with an outside investigator who recanted his story within 48 hours. That did not stop Sean Hannity on Fox and then Newt Gingrich later on Fox from furthering this. And it did not stop, I think, one entity we haven't mentioned yet, which is most intriguing, the Russian Embassy of the United Kingdom tweeting about this.

SHAPIRO: And we should say Russia has an interest in this because they have been blamed for the DNC hack. And if they can say that it was somehow this conspiracy theory linked to Seth Rich that might remove some pressure from them.

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