Jim Hoft: Dumbest Man on the Internet?
Jim Hoft: Dumbest Man on the Internet?
If you can think of an absurd right-wing scandal, Hoft promoted it
When he isn’t giving a leg up to scam artists and bigots, Hoft can be seen spawning or dutifully promoting almost every absurd “scandal” that bubbles up in conservative media circles.
With a few exceptions, the upper echelon of the conservative blogosphere is a mess.
Breitbart’s “Big” websites traffic in misleading non-scandals and have published people like 9-11 truther Michael Moriarty, racist penis-enlarger/vagina-tightener Kevin Pezzi, and former SNL actress/spouter-of-incomprehensible nonsense Victoria Jackson. NewsBusters and The Media Research Center spend a lot of time finding the liberal bias in television shows that don’t treat their gay characters as ostracized sub-humans.
Atlas Shrugs is run by a woman that is haunted at every turn by Islamic crescents, and whose hatred for the president once compelled her to claim that his penchant for “purple” (actually blue) neckties meant that Democrats were “Flying the Gangsta Colors at the White House.” Confederate Yankee Bob Owens - who also writes for Breitbart and the Washington Examiner - openly speculates about whether he and an army of “freshly-experienced combat veterans and graying patriots” are going to have to start killing people to combat the “slavery” of health care reform.
But despite all this stiff competition, Jim Hoft (aka Gateway Pundit) stands out as uniquely incompetent. Hoft runs with (or spawns) almost every inane story that bubbles up in the conservative blogosphere, has proven that he has absolutely no vetting process for the sources he cites, and apparently has a hard time with basic reading comprehension.
Hoft — who has modeled for a John Deere catalogue and “played a cop on ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ twice” — has “never had any training in politics or journalism,” but now has the “#8 ranked political blog in the United States” that is “frequently mentioned on top national news shows.”
Indeed, in spite of the fact that Hoft embarrasses himself on a near-daily basis and has shown time and again that he is either willfully dishonest or staggeringly inept, he has managed to carve out a role as one of the most-read, most respected writers in the conservative blogosphere. And his influence extends beyond the blogs. Hoft’s stories are regularly featured on Fox News’ Fox Nation website, and he has been cited as a source on-air by Fox News on multiple occasions.
Hoft’s ongoing position of influence in the conservative media is evidence that the entire movement is intellectually bankrupt.
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But Hoft’s problems with source vetting go much further. In April, Hoft was one of the first blogs to pick up a story about French President Nicolas Sarkozy supposedly saying that Obama “might be insane.” Hoft described the story as a “recent report supposedly circulating the Kremlin.” The “report” was from the European Union Times, which, as we detailed, is a ragingly anti-Semitic (and 9-11 truther) website with a section devoted to “Jews” (never a good sign) filled with incendiary articles and images, such as the one below […]
Hoft provided no explanation or apology for credibly citing an openly anti-Semitic website.
Promoting the work of bigots is actually a specialty of Hoft’s. He spent most of last December promoting smears on Department of Education official Kevin Jennings from anti-gay group MassResistance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a “hate group.”
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