“Instantly,” said Steven Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University with almost 40 years of experience in computer networking and security. That’s how long it took him to realize, he said in an interview, that a certain purported spreadsheet that I showed him was “not just fake, but a badly generated fake by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.” The spreadsheet, together with an animated film that was said to illustrate its data, formed the crux of a nearly two-hour “docu-movie,” called “Absolute Proof,” which aired at least 13 times last February on the One America...