The Hunter Biden laptop story was a sensational NY Post story involving drugs, hookers, Chinese connections, payoffs, and more. That it involved the son of the former Vice President, who was in a pitched battle for the Presidency against incumbent Donald Trump, left the media with few options to cover for Democrats.
They tried ignoring the story but the ongoing revelations became too explosive. So the left-wing army of fact-checkers came to their rescue to officially ‘debunk’ the story.
Very sloppily, Dean Miller Managing Editor from Lead Stories, wrote the takedown of the Gateway Pundit story. The obvious goal of this article is to discredit the story, Apelbaum, and the Gateway Pundit.
Because all of the items ‘debunked’ are, in fact, true.
“Leftist media organizations – the Mainstream Press – learned one lesson from 2016: destroy alternative media. They lie and then use the lies of others to deplatform conservative media and harass their advertisers. They have successfully run many good outlets out of business, but this conduct is illegal, and we will fight back. Jim Hoft and the Gateway Pundit have been libeled and defamed by Dean Miller and Lead Stories, and we will seek justice,” General Counsel for the Gateway Pundit John Burns, said.
Very confidently, Miller declared that the entire underlying story was “not true” and used “scare quotes” in order to make many of the claims by Apelbaum seem unlikely, extreme, and laughable.
An example of this is when Miller wrote this libelous sentence:
“Lead Stories has reached out to Hoft and to Apelbaum to ask how they made the connection and “authenticated” the content.”
The scare quotes around the word “authenticated” signals to the reader that they should have skepticism or derision about the use of that word.
“Mr. Apelbaum is an expert without peer, a leader in his industry, he’s doing great things in artificial intelligence and what Lead Stories said about him is insulting and harmful to his reputation,” Burns said. “His experience and resume says it all, his reputation as an expert, and the reputation of the Pundit in profiling a leader in this industry, is something we are willing to litigate in order to protect. Lead Stories needs to do a better job checking its facts before defaming honest men and women in America, the law is not on their side.”
Miller went through Apelbaum’s LinkedIn and suggested that his entire resume was fake. In one example, Miller says he searched Dun and Bradstreet’s website for mentions of his name, as they were one of Apelbaum’s past employers and found none. On their own site, they mention they have 4,037 current employees, so the purpose of this search, without context, leaves the reader with the wrongful impression that Apelbaum is a faker. Miller mentioned that he ‘reached out to’ Dun & Bradstreet to confirm Apelbaum’s employment and “will update” the report “when they reply.” Again leaving any reasonable reader on the impression that they have not yet replied, and they have likely not replied because they have no record of Apelbaum.
Miller then uses the same lazy ‘laptop journalism’ where he searches a few sites and reports unresponded emails and voicemails as admissions of fact, to declare that there’s no proof Apelbaum worked at Western Union, because he searched their website for a mention of his name and likely sent an email that went unreplied to. For context, just the parent company of Western Union has 11,500 employees according to Dun & Bradstreet. So it’s very unlikely that a website crawl and a solitary email or phone call would be able to get a confirmation that someone was an employee years ago.
TGP reached out to Dean Miller for comment and did not receive a response. TGP called Alan Duke, Miller’s editor, and left a voicemail that was returned via email with this quote:
“We do not expect much from your “reporting” considering your publication recently published a hit piece on us that was filled with false claims. It says a lot that a reporter who just weeks ago threatened to sue us is now assigned to write about us. Your bias is showing.”
Duke is referencing a dispute involving another discredited Lead Stories article from several weeks ago, where his reporter said a separate TGP article was “missing context” because it referred to a Dominion Whistleblower as a “staffer” and not a “contractor” and then refused to correct their reporting when their errors were explained.
Notably, Lead Stories appears to have disabled the ability to search through Dean Miller’s past stories on their website. It is not clear what they are hiding, and disabling search does not appear to have been done to any other Lead Stories reporter.
The Dean Miller case is numbered 20SL-CC06083 in St. Louis County Circuit Court, and is styled James Hoft et al. v. Dean S. Miller. Miller is being served soon and the case, according to Burns, will proceed quickly in the next few weeks.
The post The Gateway Pundit Sues Lead Stories Fact-Check Reporter for Defamation appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
via The Gateway Pundit
Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com