Mark Twain warned that “a lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” Caught off guard, legitimate media outlets have printed the unexamined claims of Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, and other dangerous myths.

The latest such denial of truth is the false assertion that we invented the Russian business retreat from thin air–and that 1,300 multinational companies never really exited Russia. Amazingly, we are now being forced to defend that the business retreat did happen after all in a newly co-authored research monograph.

Not that any of this is particularly new or novel. Yale mass communications pioneer Carl Hovland argued in 1949 that propaganda flourishes with the repetition of lies so that the message lingers even when the low-credibility initial sources are forgotten. This persuasion distortion was labeled “the sleeper effect.”