witness23
Veteran Expediter
No filter, no standards, much embarrassment
At this point, you might be thinking, "where does Hoft come up with all of this crap?" With disturbing frequency, the answer to that question seems to be either "he saw it on Free Republic," or "someone emailed it to him and he didn't bother looking into it."
On June 7, Hoft ran an article with the breathless headline, "HEAVY WEAPONS Discovered in Cargo of Mavi Marmara." (The Mavi Marmara was part of a Palestinian aid flotilla that had been raided days earlier by Israeli commandos while en route to Gaza.) He linked to a video that, in his words, "shows the heavy weapons discovered in the Mavi Marmara Gaza Flotilla ship."
After two minutes of research, we discovered that the video in question predated the Mavi Marmara raid by at least one year. By the time we posted, Hoft had offered a rare sort-of correction, crossing out the entire post and adding a note informing readers "This email that is making the rounds today is a HOAX." (Note: the post appears to have since been deleted.)
All that could have been avoided had he done a bare minimum of fact checking before basing an incendiary article on a hoax chain email.
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."
And, as you might expect from someone who bases stories on chain emails, he also ends up promoting scam artists. In May, Hoft hyped a press release "warning" about "global cooling" from the Space and Science Research Center (SSRC) -- a source he described as "the leading independent research organization in the US on the subject of climate change."
As we discovered thanks to a quick Google search, the SSRC is run by John L Casey, a man with no formal background or experience with climate science who Hoft's fellow climate science deniers have labeled "a scam artist trying to get his hands in your pockets." But Casey's press release reinforced Hoft's already ironclad opposition to climate science, so he ran with it.
That's not journalism; it's hackish stenography, and it's just one of the countless embarrassingly incompetent Jim Hoft posts from this year alone.
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.
An abbreviated list:
The hilarious fabrication that Obama wanted to "ban sport fishing":
Andrew Breitbart's smear of then-USDA official Shirley Sherrod:
(Hoft also "broke" the related fabrication - uncritically repeated by Fox & Friends - that NAACP president Ben Jealous was at Sherrod's speech.)
At this point, you might be thinking, "where does Hoft come up with all of this crap?" With disturbing frequency, the answer to that question seems to be either "he saw it on Free Republic," or "someone emailed it to him and he didn't bother looking into it."
On June 7, Hoft ran an article with the breathless headline, "HEAVY WEAPONS Discovered in Cargo of Mavi Marmara." (The Mavi Marmara was part of a Palestinian aid flotilla that had been raided days earlier by Israeli commandos while en route to Gaza.) He linked to a video that, in his words, "shows the heavy weapons discovered in the Mavi Marmara Gaza Flotilla ship."
After two minutes of research, we discovered that the video in question predated the Mavi Marmara raid by at least one year. By the time we posted, Hoft had offered a rare sort-of correction, crossing out the entire post and adding a note informing readers "This email that is making the rounds today is a HOAX." (Note: the post appears to have since been deleted.)
All that could have been avoided had he done a bare minimum of fact checking before basing an incendiary article on a hoax chain email.
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."
And, as you might expect from someone who bases stories on chain emails, he also ends up promoting scam artists. In May, Hoft hyped a press release "warning" about "global cooling" from the Space and Science Research Center (SSRC) -- a source he described as "the leading independent research organization in the US on the subject of climate change."
As we discovered thanks to a quick Google search, the SSRC is run by John L Casey, a man with no formal background or experience with climate science who Hoft's fellow climate science deniers have labeled "a scam artist trying to get his hands in your pockets." But Casey's press release reinforced Hoft's already ironclad opposition to climate science, so he ran with it.
That's not journalism; it's hackish stenography, and it's just one of the countless embarrassingly incompetent Jim Hoft posts from this year alone.
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.
An abbreviated list:
The hilarious fabrication that Obama wanted to "ban sport fishing":
Andrew Breitbart's smear of then-USDA official Shirley Sherrod:
(Hoft also "broke" the related fabrication - uncritically repeated by Fox & Friends - that NAACP president Ben Jealous was at Sherrod's speech.)