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Sean Hannity shares fake news story citing ‘Reddit users’ as sources

Gateway Pundit, the outlet that published the story, recently received White House press credentials.

Gateway Pundit owner Jim Hoft (center) with Gateway Pundit White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich (right) at the Deploraball in January. CREDIT: Video screengrab
Gateway Pundit owner Jim Hoft (center) with Gateway Pundit White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich (right) at the Deploraball in January. CREDIT: Video screengrab

Late Thursday, Fox News host Sean Hannity shared a Gateway Pundit story that purported to show “globalist war criminal John McCain requested campaign donations from the Russians!”

The six paragraph-long Gateway Pundit story shared by Hannity actually cites “Reddit users” as sources. The claim it makes about McCain — who, unlike Hannity, has shown a willingness to criticize President Trump — was debunked eight years ago.

Hannity later deleted his tweet. McCain’s office released a statement calling on him to “correct the record.”

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On Thursday afternoon, Hannity apologized:

This is far from the first time Gateway Pundit has spread fake news. During the election, the site regularly peddled baseless conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health. A recent Politico report cites a few more examples:

Gateway Pundit has gained notice for a number of its recent missteps, including reporting that an Asian woman seen photographing Rex Tillerson’s notes at a Senate confirmation hearing was Washington Post homepage editor Doris Truong, which it was not. The site later updated its post to note that the woman in question was not Truong and to accuse the mainstream media of having “circled the wagons” to avoid reporting of the true identity of this mysterious woman.

During the campaign, the site claimed that photos of hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Cleveland showed the crowd for a Trump rally when, in fact, the photos depicted a victory parade for the NBA champion Cavaliers, and during the inauguration, it reported as real a hoax picture that had been poorly photoshopped to make it appear as though Obama was touching Melania Trump’s rear end during the transfer of power.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration granted the site White House press credentials.

Gateway Pundit’s White House correspondent — Lucian Wintrich, shown above with site owner Jim Hoft — recently posted a photograph of himself posing in front of a swastika on Instagram. In response to another user who asked him why he did that, Wintrich wrote, “good modern art is supposed to be provocative.”