Who Owns Conservative Website The Gateway Pundit?
The Gateway Pundit is a far-right website that promotes misinformation and fake news. Founder Jim Hoft continues to own and operate the site.
Sept. 8 2022, Published 2:07 p.m. ET
Jim Hoft started The Gateway Pundit to report "the truth," though it has been discredited for frequent fake news stories.
The Gateway Pundit is an American website that's known for promoting ultra-conservative and frequently false “news” to its audience. Like former President Donald Trump, which The Gateway Pundit supported, its founder Jim Hoft was also suspended indefinitely from Twitter for promoting falsehoods. Who owns The Gateway Pundit today?
In the battle to control the media, far-right media outlets like The Gateway Pundit have been born. The site was founded in 2004 by Hoft and grew from his one-person operation to a larger entity driven by advertising revenue. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and fake news are known to be its bread and butter.
Founder Jim Hoft started TGP to “expose the wickedness of the left.”
Hoft launched The Gateway Pundit prior to the election in 2004 and is its owner today. The site gained further traction and notoriety during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Once Trump was in office, Hoft and an associate were granted White House press credentials.
Lucian Wintrich was the Washington correspondent for the conservative outlet. The New York Times reported at the time that Wintrich said he would “be reporting far more fairly” than left-wing outlets. He even said, “We will be doing a little trolling of the media in general here.”
The NYT noted that conservative personalities and media outlets gravitated towards and cited The Gateway Pundit. People like former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, and The Drudge Report had referred to TGP information.
The Gateway Pundit is known as a fake news website.
In spite of Hoft’s claim that he started The Gateway Pundit to “speak the truth,” numerous sources have pegged its content as false or unreliable. Fact-checking organization PolitiFact says that roughly 59 percent of the site’s claims have been found to be fake, and 13 percent were dubbed as “mostly false.”
The Harvard Journal of Law & Technology called The Gateway Pundit one of the websites that “primarily propagate fake news.” Newsweek has also called out the website as being a “far-right fake-news website.”
When questioned about the proliferation of false stories on the website, Wintrich evaded responsibility, saying TGP must share news quickly, leading to occasional false stories. “When you are trying to get new information out there as quickly as possible, occasionally you’ll get something wrong and have to fix it” (NYT).
Jim Hoft with correspondent Lucian Wintrich, who reported on the Trump administration for The Gateway Pundit.
Twitter banned Jim Hoft from the platform for spreading misinformation.
In February of 2021, Hoft was banned from Twitter. Much like Trump and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, he drew the ire of Twitter officials for promoting 2020 election falsehoods. The cause was a violation of the “civic integrity policy” at Twitter. Hoft shared numerous posts claiming the election had been stolen from Trump.
Google also demonetized the website in September 2021. This was after the site had frequently promoted false information related to the pandemic, the 2020 election, and COVID-19 vaccines, Forbes reported. The site had also shared election misinformation that prompted calls for extreme violence toward election officials.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that The Gateway Pundit had earned over $1 million using Google’s AdSense from November 2020 to June 2021. However, the site is still going even without its Google advertising revenue.