The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.
Founded by Jim Hoft in 2004, 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. In September 2021, Google demonetized the site for publishing misinformation.
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 resides as of February 2018. He operates the site from Ellisville, a western suburb.
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. 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 (@gatewaypundit) 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.
White House press credentials
In February 2017, founder Jim 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 (along with the publisher TGP Communications, LLC), filed suit (represented by Marc Randazza) because Conradson was denied a press pass; although a preliminary injunction was denied by the lower court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the injunction because 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 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".