Right-wing media figures claim Clinton behind Obama/Muslim smears

Summary: Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers, Rush Limbaugh, and John Gibson all forwarded the accusation made by a website controlled by Rev. Sun Myung Moon that Sen. Hillary Clinton was responsible for spreading information linking Sen. Barack Obama to a madrassa, or Muslim school. None of the four cited any evidence, other than the article, that Clinton was responsible for promoting the madrassa story, and the article cited no one by name.

On the January 19 editions of their radio programs, conservative talk show hosts Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers and Rush Limbaugh, as well as Fox News' John Gibson on the same day's edition of The Big Story, forwarded the accusation, originally published on the website InsightMag.com, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) was responsible for spreading information about Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) -- specifically, that Obama "spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia." The article, bearing the headline "Hillary's team has questions about Obama's Muslim background," asserted that "researchers connected to Senator Clinton" disclosed the "details of Mr. Obama's Muslim past." Despite acknowledging near the end of his show that it "[d]oesn't seem" that "Hillary's fingerprints [are] on the story," Gibson said earlier in that program that "[t]he New York senator has reportedly outed Obama's madrassa past."