Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, who runs a pro-Trump blog that acquired White House press credentials in February, has a doozy of a correction on a story that is breathtakingly fake news.
To his credit, Hoft has left the disaster area intact, so students of journalism can learn how best to not to shit the bed.
Apart from the word ‘Boom!” literally every word in the site’s July 7 headline is wrong or misleading: “BOOM! CNN Reporter Harasses Meme Maker’s Father – Gets Busted in the Chops.”
In the video, CNN “New Day” host Alisyn Comerota tells her co-host Chris Cuomo how “amazing” she thinks it is that one of their reporters unearthed the meme maker who ran a video of Trump wrestling a CNN logo to the ground on Reddit.
Cut to a video in which a young, male TV correspondent encounters a crotchety old man who punches him in the jaw. When the reporter threatens to call the cops because he’s bleeding, the man says he’s fixing to punch him again.
Except there are an avalanche of problems.
The video is from 2013 and has nothing to do with the Reddit user known as HanAssholeSolo. The reporter in the video is also not from CNN. But the best is Hoft’s sourcing — even in the correction, he hilariously states that “The Internet” told him this was father of the “minor” who created the now infamous GIF of President Trump pummeling a CNN logo to the floor.
Which brings us to another piece of propaganda that has already been debunked: the person who created the GIF is not 15.
Gateway Pundit ran an alarming correction with a bizarre typo:
“Update: This video was not the father of the person who created the meme that President Trump used in his tweet over the weekend. The Internet states that this is the father of the minor who created the GIF. The video is also not of a CNN reporter but was of a reporter from another media outlet in [sic] from an incident apparently in 2013.”
APPARENTLY in 2013? Is he sure?
The Mirror sought comment from Hoft on the thought process that led him to publish such an error-laced story.
UPDATE: Hoft is traveling. But he sent word through his White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich: “It was sent to us by a source that was apparently mislead, the error was corrected within 15 minutes of it being up.” Wintrich added, “Not sure how this is a story. But you do you.”
Watch the original February, 2013 CBS Atlanta video below: