Whatever one might say about the lousy performance of the mainstream media—and there’s quite a lot to say—a blogger who propagated the lunatic claim that President Obama was Photoshopped into the famous picture of the White House Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden raid isn’t in a strong position to lecture on “fake news.” (The list of similarly dubious stories Hoft has run with is far too long to detail.)
As with Cernovich, there are good reasons to believe Gateway Pundit has a following in the White House. On March 3, as the investigation into Trump and Russia was heating up, the president tweeted, “We should start an immediate investigation into [Senate minority leader Chuck] Schumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite!” Attached to the tweet was a photo of a smiling Schumer and Vladimir Putin, enjoying donuts and coffee in New York in 2003. Gateway Pundit had featured the photo on its home page the day before. And Gateway Pundit is undeniably influential in the Trump-friendly media ecosystem. In February, Sean Hannity tweeted a Gateway Pundit story to his 2.3 million followers about “globalist war criminal John McCain” soliciting campaign donations from Russia. Hannity’s comment: “Wow if true.”
If journalism in the Trump era had to be reduced to one slogan, “Wow if true” would do the trick. Whether by design or not, Trump appears to have broken the media in ways from which it will be difficult to recover. As troubling as the White House’s ordaining Mike Cernovich and Jim Hoft into the Beltway clerisy might be, the traditional media have reacted to Trump’s desire to operate outside the usual journalistic rules by further eroding their own credibility.
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