The Gateway Pundit
The Gateway Pundit is an American far-right news and opinion website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.
The Gateway Pundit expanded from a one-person enterprise into a multi-employee operation that is supported primarily by advertising revenue. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the site received over a million unique visitors per day.
History
The Gateway Pundit was founded prior to the 2004 United States presidential election, according to its founder, Jim Hoft, to "speak the truth" and to "expose the wickedness of the left." In 2016, it provided favorable coverage of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and, after Trump's election, was granted press credentials by the White House.The website's name makes reference to the Gateway Arch in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, where Hoft resides as of February 2018.
White House press credentials
In February 2017, founder Jim Hoft and The Gateway Pundits Lucian Wintrich, a 28-year-old writer and artist, were granted White House press credentials. Wintrich has collaborated with Milo Yiannopoulos, the former editor at Breitbart News.As official correspondents, Hoft and Wintrich are able to attend all press briefings and address their questions to the White House press secretary. In an interview, Wintrich said they will: "be reporting far more fairly than a lot of the very left-wing outlets that are currently occupying the briefing room. We will be doing a little trolling of the media in general here". According to Wintrich, The Gateway Pundits mission in the White House is "to help drain the press swamp" by covering the press corps' "very leftist and biased reporting," and to alleviate what he sees as bias among reporters in the White House press corps.
False stories and conspiracy theories
The Gateway Pundit is known as a source of viral falsehoods and hoaxes. It has been described by Newsweek as a fake news website and by CNN as a website "prone to peddling conspiracy theories." As a result of a number of lawsuits against The Gateway Pundit over its false stories, it was reported in March 2018 that Jim Hoft had told his writers to be more careful: "I don't want any more lawsuits so we have to be really careful with what we put up." Hoft stated that he believes the lawsuits "are part of a multi-pronged effort to attack media outlets on the right."In late 2019, the English Wikipedia community deprecated The Gateway Pundit as a source for reporting "falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and intentionally misleading stories".
2016 election
The Gateway Pundit promoted false rumors about voter fraud and Hillary Clinton's health. Specifically, rumors of Hillary Clinton's poor health were disseminated via The Gateway Pundits articles entitled, "Breaking: 71% of Doctors Say Hillary Health Concerns Serious, Possibly Disqualifying!" and "Wow! Did Hillary Clinton Just Suffer a Seizure on Camera?" Regarding voter fraud, The Gateway Pundit published an unsubstantiated report during the 2016 presidential election from the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, claiming that Republicans had accused Broward County, Florida officials of tampering with mail-in ballots.Misidentifying shooters and terrorists
The Gateway Pundit has a record of misidentifying perpetrators of shootings and terror attacks.In October 2017, The Gateway Pundit published an article falsely implicating an innocent person as the shooter in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The article was promoted by Google as a "top story" for searches for his name. Gateway Pundit asserted that New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi had reported that ISIS may have evidence that it was behind the shooting, but Callimachi denied that she had ever made such an assertion.
Shortly after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in which a person drove a vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one, The Gateway Pundit falsely identified a young man from Michigan as the driver. After the misidentification took place, the family went into hiding after receiving several death threats. Together with his father, the Michigan man filed a defamation lawsuit against the publication and other related parties.
The Gateway Pundit promoted conspiracy theories about Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. In February 2018, The Gateway Pundit published an article erroneously stating that school shooter Nikolas Cruz was a registered Democrat, citing a registered Broward County voter with a similar name. The website later corrected its mistake. Later that month, Gateway Pundit was one of a number of far-right websites that pushed the claim that at least one of the teenage survivors of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was a deep state pawn, alleging that David Hogg's gun control activism was being coached by his retired FBI agent father.
In July 2018, Gateway Pundit falsely claimed that a man arrested with bomb-making equipment and illegal weapons had been a "leftist antifa terrorist". The individual in question was however a conservative whose Facebook profile was littered with pro-Second Amendment memes.
In August 2018, Gateway Pundit falsely identified a Reddit user as the perpetrator of the Jacksonville Landing shooting.
Other
In December 2017, The Gateway Pundit published a Reddit post as evidence that Democratic activists were committing voter fraud in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election. The redditor behind the post later said that the post was intended "as an obvious troll." When asked by The Washington Post, the writer of the Gateway Pundit post declined to say whether he had contacted the redditor to verify the information; later the Gateway Pundit story contained an update at the bottom: "Liberals say these are fake Reddit posts Regardless, the posts are still up on Reddit and the posters are still encouraging Democrats to cheat." Also in December 2017, Gateway Pundit published a story falsely saying that Facebook had taken down a previous Gateway Pundit story about the Alabama election, when in fact a Facebook algorithm had made it less prevalent after it had been flagged as fake news.In April 2018, The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed in a headline that two prominent African-American conservative video bloggers – Diamond and Silk – had been censored by Facebook.
In September 2018, after psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford alleged that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when they were teenagers, The Gateway Pundit published an article erroneously claiming that Kavanaugh's mother, a district court judge in Maryland, had once ruled in a foreclosure case against Dr. Ford's parents, creating what The Gateway Pundit called "bad blood" between the two families. In an update, The Gateway Pundit noted, "CBS News reports the case was settled amicably and the Blaseys kept their house."
On October 30, 2018, NBC News and The Atlantic published articles detailing a scheme to falsely accuse Robert Mueller of sexual misconduct in 1974. The articles reported involvement by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, the latter a writer for Gateway Pundit. Hours after these reports, Gateway Pundit published on its site "exclusive documents" about a "very credible witness" to support the accusations against Mueller. Each document had in its header the phrase "International Private Intelligence," the business slogan of Surefire Intelligence, a firm created by Wohl. The site removed the documents later that day, stating they were investigating the matter, as well as "serious allegations against Jacob Wohl." The following day, Gateway Pundits owner Jim Hoft retweeted Wohl's comment suggesting Mueller's office was actually behind the scheme. Mueller's office had days earlier referred the scheme to the FBI. Burkman and Wohl convened a press conference outside Washington on November 1, ostensibly to present a woman who they said signed an affidavit, which Gateway Pundit had published, accusing Mueller of raping her in a New York hotel room in 2010 — on a date he was contemporaneously reported by The Washington Post to be serving jury duty in Washington. The men accused Mueller's office of "leaking" the eight year-old Post story to discredit their allegations. The purported accuser, a Carolyne Cass, did not appear at the press conference, with the men asserting she had panicked in fear of her life and taken a flight to another location. Soon after the press conference, Hoft announced that Gateway Pundit had "suspended our relationship" with Wohl.
Jim Hoft
In March 2013, Hoft was awarded the Reed Irvine Award for New Media by the Accuracy in Media watchdog at the Conservative Political Action Conference.In August 2013, Hoft contracted a serious strep infection, lost his vision in one eye, suffered five strokes, and required 12 hours of open-heart surgery. Three months after his treatment and before the imminent loss of his health insurance, Hoft stated that it was the Affordable Care Act that has caused insurance companies to leave the marketplace in his home state of Missouri.
Following the 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Hoft came out as gay, blamed Barack Obama for the massacre and derided "leftwing gay activists" Sally Kohn and Perez Hilton for blaming the National Rifle Association and Christianity for the attack.
On March 4, 2017, Hoft spoke at the Spirit of America Rally in Nashville, Tennessee and announced that he was starting an event, "The Real News Correspondents' Dinner", to compete with the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The event occurred as planned on April 28, 2017.
In February 2018, Hoft was scheduled to participate in a Conservative Political Action Conference panel titled "Social Media Censorship." After CPAC preemptively removed him from the discussion on censorship following Hoft's coverage of the recent Florida mass shooting, he stated that CPAC was in effect engaging in its own form of censorship.