The Gateway Pundit
The Gateway Pundit is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.
Founded in 2004 by Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit expanded from a one-person enterprise into a multi-employee operation, supported primarily by advertising revenue. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the site received over a million unique visitors per day.
In September 2021, Google demonetized the site for publishing misinformation. In April 2024, Hoft announced that the TGP parent company, TGP Communications, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, blaming multiple defamation lawsuits. The bankruptcy case was dismissed in July 2024, with the judge finding it had been filed in bad faith to avoid the lawsuits against the site.
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". The website's name makes reference to the Gateway Arch in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, where Hoft resided as of February 2018. He operates the site from Ellisville, a western suburb.In 2016, the site provided favorable coverage of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and, after Trump's election, was granted press credentials by the White House. A 2017 study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University found that The Gateway Pundit was the fourth most-shared source among Trump supporters on Twitter during the 2016 election, behind Fox News, The Hill and Breitbart News.
A study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that The Gateway Pundit earned up to $1.1 million in Google Ad revenue between November 2020 and July 2021. Twitter permanently suspended Hoft's account on February 6, 2021, for repeatedly publishing misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but it was reinstated on December 16, 2022, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
Trump-era White House press credentials
In February 2017, Hoft and The Gateway Pundit Lucian Wintrich, a 28-year-old writer and artist, were granted White House press credentials by the Trump administration. Wintrich has collaborated with Milo Yiannopoulos, the former editor at Breitbart News.As official correspondents, Hoft and Wintrich were able to attend all press briefings and address their questions to the White House press secretary. In an interview, Wintrich said they would be "reporting far more fairly than a lot of the very left-wing outlets that are currently occupying the briefing room" and "doing a little trolling of the media in general here". According to Wintrich, The Gateway Pundit mission in the White House was "to help drain the press swamp" by covering the press corps' "very leftist and biased reporting", and to alleviate what he saw as bias among reporters in the White House press corps.
On August 14, 2020, after President Trump called on invited Gateway Pundit reporter Alicia Powe for a question at his televised White House press briefing, the White House Correspondents' Association president told the Washington Examiner that including Powe as a guest was an "outrageous" violation of the group's social distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maricopa County press credentials
In November 2022, Jordan Conradson, a reporter for The Gateway Pundit, filed suit against Maricopa County, Arizona, because Conradson was denied a press pass. Although a lower court refused to issue a preliminary injunction, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the injunction, saying that the denial violated the First Amendmentit was not "viewpoint neutral". To the contrary, the Ninth Circuit found "that a predominant reason for the County denying Conradson a press pass was the viewpoint expressed in his writings".False stories and conspiracy theories
The Gateway Pundit is known as a source of viral falsehoods and hoaxes. It has been described by the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology as one of the websites that "primarily propagate fake news", by Newsweek as a fake news website, and by CNN as a website "prone to peddling conspiracy theories".In August 2019, journalism professors Erik P. Bucy and John E. Newhagen observed that "the most aggressive fake news sites and associated YouTube channels, such as InfoWars, The Gateway Pundit, and The Daily Stormer, are routinely sued by victims of these published reports for libel and defamation." As a result of a number of lawsuits against The Gateway Pundit over its false stories, it was reported in March 2018 that 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 said that he believed the lawsuits were "part of a multi-pronged effort to attack media outlets on the right".
In November 2019, the Wikipedia community deprecated The Gateway Pundit as an untrustworthy source of information, due to it "publishing hoax articles and reporting conspiracy theories as fact".
In July 2021, a spokesperson for Google said that the company had demonetized The Gateway Pundit homepage and some of its articles: "We have strict publisher policies that prohibit content promoting anti-vaccine theories, COVID-19 misinformation, and false claims about the 2020 U.S. presidential electionand our enforcement can be as targeted as demonetizing a specific page. We already actioned the majority of pages shared from this report back in 2020 or early 2021 and similarly stopped serving ads on the site's homepage last year. We will continue to take appropriate action if new content is uploaded that violates our policies."
In September 2021, Google demonetized the entire site. A Google spokesman said "We gave the Gateway Pundit ample notice to address persistent policy violations before we took action. We will not serve Google ads on the site until they can comply with our guidelines." The decision took place a few days ahead of the airing of a French documentary in which a Google representative was confronted with printouts of ads on the site.
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 Pundit 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.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 received several death threats and went into hiding. The Michigan man and his father filed a defamation lawsuit against the publication and other related parties.
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 the man's name. The ''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.
The Gateway Pundit promoted conspiracy theories about the 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, The Gateway Pundit was one of a number of far-right websites that pushed the claim that at least one of the teenage survivors of the 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, The 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, The Gateway Pundit'' falsely identified a Reddit user as the perpetrator of the Jacksonville Landing shooting.
2020 election
In November 2020, The Gateway Pundit erroneously stated that a software glitch during the 2020 United States presidential election led to 10,000 votes in Rock County, Wisconsin, being "moved" from incumbent president Donald Trump to his opponent, Joe Biden; the article was then promoted by Eric Trump, President Trump's son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization as part of Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. The article was disputed by the Associated Press, which said that the supposed discrepancy was caused by a technical error in AP's reporting of results obtained from Rock County's election website, an error that was resolved within minutes and did not pertain to the counting of actual ballots. Rock County clerk Lisa Tollefson said that The Gateway Pundit reported incorrect information, and that the county stood by the final tally. The Wisconsin Elections Commission later added: "The AP's error in no way reflects any problem with how Rock County counted or posted unofficial results. The WEC has confirmed with Rock County that their unofficial results reporting was always accurate.... These errors have nothing to do with Wisconsin's official results, which are triple checked at the municipal, county and state levels before they are certified."In December 2020, The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's brother "Ron" worked for a Chinese tech firm. Raffensperger's brother's name was not Ron and he did not work for a Chinese company.
In August 2021, The Daily Beast reported that according to a senior Trump White House official, Trump was seen holding printouts of articles from The Gateway Pundit during his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and on one occasion gave an official an article from the site which alleged massive fraud in favor of Biden and told the official to act on it.
Days after the results of the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit were released, The Gateway Pundit published an altered version of the auditors' report which falsely stated, "the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable." The Gateway Pundit wrote that it acquired the altered document from "Byrne". Byrne denied he was the source of the document.
In October 2021, The Gateway Pundit used a study by the Poor People's Campaign to falsely claim that Democrats had used low-income voters to steal the election; the study had found that about 35% of the 2020 presidential electorate had household incomes below $50,000. PolitiFact rated the claim "Pants on Fire", finding that The Gateway Pundit had conflated voter outreach with voter fraud.
Analysis conducted in 2022 by researchers with the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group found The Gateway Pundit was the second-most prolific purveyor of election misinformation on Twitter during the late months of 2020.