Lucian Wintrich, a former advertising man hired to cover politics for Gateway Pundit, appeared on Infowars today to provide numerous excuses to explain why Gateway Pundit published an article that incorrectly identified the shooter who carried out last night’s massacre in Las Vegas.

Early this morning, as news was breaking about a gunman who fired an automatic weapon into a large crowd at a country music show and killed more than 50 people on the Las Vegas strip, Gateway Pundit published an article falsely accusing an innocent man of being the shooter.

This afternoon, Wintrich told Infowars guest host Jack Posobiec that the story was quickly removed from the site and criticized mainstream media for failing to address the possibility that the shooter could have been radicalized by militant Islamists, despite the fact that the FBI stated the shooter had no known connection to foreign terror groups.

“Instead of focusing on that, they’re saying, ‘Oh, well you know Gateway Pundit for ten minutes at four in the morning briefly had the wrong name up and then pulled it.’ How is that a story?” Wintrich said.

Posobiec affirmed Wintrich, stating that the man Gateway Pundit incorrectly identified as the shooter was “the husband of the girl involved,” mentioning the shooter’s alleged girlfriend, and credited Gateway Pundit for identifying the man correctly, albeit wrongly accusing him of mass murder.

Wintrich then tried to excuse the misidentification because “nobody’s really reading us, to the best of my knowledge, at four in the morning, right? It’s such a nonsensical thing.”

Posobiec and Wintrich began to list off examples of erroneous reporting by mainstream publications to argue that Gateway Pundit’s error is no different than errors mainstream media have made in similar circumstances that required retractions.

“This smarmy club” of mainstream journalists “ignores continuous false reporting, and misidentification is just part of it. Half their stories—propaganda for the left. Half their stories are false,” Wintrich said.

Posobiec said the reason media have criticized Gateway Pundit so harshly is because it is “scared to death” of people reading Gateway Pundit and watching Infowars expand because they “don’t want alternate sources of information out there.”