 | |
Type of site | News, opinion |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Founded | January 11, 2010 (2010-1-11) |
| Headquarters | 1920 L Street NW, 2nd FloorWashington, D.C. 20036 |
| Owner | The Daily Caller, Inc. |
| Founder(s) | Tucker Carlson Neil Patel[1][2] |
| Key people |
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| URL | dailycaller |
| Advertising | Native |
| Registration | Optional, required to comment |
| Launched | January 11, 2010; 15 years ago (2010-01-11) |
| Current status | Online |
The Daily Caller is aright-wing news and opinion website based inWashington, D.C.[7] It was founded by political commentatorTucker Carlson and political advisorNeil Patel in 2010. Launched as a "conservative answer toThe Huffington Post",The Daily Caller quadrupled its audience and became profitable by 2012, surpassing several rival websites by 2013. In 2020, the site was described byThe New York Times as having been "a pioneer in online conservative journalism".[8]The Daily Caller is a member of the White Housepress pool.[9]
The Daily Caller has published false stories and declined to correct them when they were shown to be untrue.[16] The website has published articles that contradict thescientific consensus on climate change. In September 2018, the website cut ties with an editor linked towhite supremacist causes.[17][18] The website has responded to challenges to its stories in various ways, in some cases defending their claims, and in others expressing regret for story headlines or content;[19] and on at least one occasion, when pointed out by other news outlets, the website has repudiated a past article writer due to support of extremist views.[17]
In June 2020, Carlson left the site, with Patel buying out Carlson's stake to become majority owner.[20][8]Foster Friess, a major conservative donor also known for being an investment manager, remained a partial owner until his death in 2021.[8][21]
The Daily Caller was founded byTucker Carlson andNeil Patel. After raising $3 million in funding from businessmanFoster Friess, the website was launched on January 11, 2010. The organization began with a reporting staff of 21 in its Washington office. It was launched as a "conservative answer toThe Huffington Post", similarly featuring sections in broad range of subjects beyond politics. WhenThe Daily Caller launched in 2010, it became the third Washington DC–based news site besidesTalking Points Memo andPolitico.[22]
In a 2010 interview with theColumbia Journalism Review, Carlson describedThe Daily Caller's prospective audience as "[p]eople who are distrustful of conventional news organizations". Carlson said "the coverage of the Tea Party blows me away by its stupidity. The assumption of almost everyone I know who covers politics for the networks or daily newspapers is: they're allbirthers, they're all crazy, they're upset aboutfluoride in the water, probably racist. And those assumptions have prevented good journalism from taking place".[23]
By late 2012, the site had quadrupled its page view and total audience and had become profitable without ever buying an advertisement for itself.[24]
Vince Coglianese replaced Carlson as editor-in-chief in 2016 when theTucker Carlson Tonight show began on Fox.[25] Carlson departed the site in June 2020 to increase his focus on his new show.[26] Patel brought inOmeed Malik as a new partner; a former hedge fund managing director andMuslim AmericanDemocrat, he was a donor toDonald Trump's2016 presidential campaign.[27]The Daily Caller became a minority-owned and -run company thereafter.[28] Friess remained a partial owner until his death in 2021.[8][21]
In 2020,The New York Times noted that "several former Daily Caller reporters occupy prominent roles in Washington journalism", specifically notingCNN White House correspondentKaitlan Collins andDaily Mail reporterDavid Martosko.[8]
When it first launched in January 2010,Mercedes Bunz, writing forThe Guardian, saidThe Daily Caller was "setting itself up to be the conservative answer toThe Huffington Post". According to Bunz, a year before the website launched, Carlson promoted it as "a new political website leaning more to the right thanPolitico andTalkingPointsMemo". However, at launch, he wrote a letter to readers that said it was not going to be aright-wing site.[29] "We're not going to suck up to people in power, the way so many have", Carlson said.[30] During a January 2010 interview withPolitico, Carlson saidThe Daily Caller was not going to be tied to his personal political ideologies and that he wanted it to be "breaking stories of importance".[31]
In aWashington Post article aboutThe Daily Caller's launch,Howard Kurtz wrote, "[Carlson's] partner is Neil Patel, a formerDick Cheney aide. His opinion editor is Moira Bagley, who spent 2008 as theRepublican National Committee's press secretary. And his $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financierFoster Friess, a big-time GOP donor. But Carlson insists this won't be a right-wing site". Kurtz quoted Carlson as saying, "We're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone".[32]
In an interview withThe New York Times, Carlson said that the vast majority of traditional reporting comes from a liberal point of view and calledThe Daily Caller's reporting "the balance against the rest of the conventional press".[24] In a 2012Washingtonian article, Tom Bartlett said Carlson and Patel developedThe Daily Caller as "a conservative news site in the mold of the liberalHuffington Post but with more firearms coverage and fewer nipple-slip slide shows".[33]
In 2019, theColumbia Journalism Review describedThe Daily Caller as "right wing",[34] a description also used byBusiness Insider,[35]Snopes,[36] andHarvard University'sBerkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.[37]The Guardian in April 2019 saidThe Daily Caller was known for pro-Trump content.[38] In 2020, Austrian social scientistChristian Fuchs of theUniversity of Westminster describedThe Daily Caller asalt-right.[39] A 2021Politico article describedThe Daily Caller as "mainstream right", as opposed to more "conspiratorial fringe" outlets such asOne America News Network.[40]
The Daily Caller has published articles that dispute thescientific consensus on climate change. According toScience magazine,The Daily Caller's "climate reporting focuses on doubt and highlights data that suggests climate concerns from the world's leading science agencies and organizations are incorrect".[41]The accuracy of certain articles published in the early-to-mid 2010s was particularly questioned, as with a 2011 article claiming that theUnited States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was on a path towards spending $21 billion per year to hire 230,000 staff to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; at the time, the EPA had 17,000 staff and a total budget of $8.7 billion, while the numbers reported byThe Daily Caller reflected the numbers that, according toPolitifact and a legal brief filed in a related case, the agency in question would be obligated to hire "to regulate greenhouse gasses from all sources that emit them above the level set in statute".[42][43][44] The story went viral in right-wing media,[45] and was repeated by Republican politicians.[43] Criticized articles on the subject later in the 2010s included the republication of a 2017 article published inDaily Mail which claimed that theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) manipulated data to make climate change appear worse; other news outlets debunked theDaily Mail story.[46][47] A 2018 story cited anObama administration memo pushing authors of an EPANational Climate Assessment report to include worst-case scenarios as evidence that the Obama administration intended those authors to focus on such scenarios.FactCheck.org disputed this story, stating that the memo "does not show that the Obama administration pushed for certain scenarios".[48]
Fact-checkers have frequently debunkedDaily Caller stories.[38]According to the 2018 book,Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, written by Harvard University scholarsYochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts,The Daily Caller fails to followjournalistic norms in its reporting.[3]: 14 According to theEncyclopædia Britannica,The Daily Caller "descended into extremism and sensationalism, publishing unsupported and frequently vulgar attacks on Democratic leaders, false criticisms of liberal causes, and popular conspiracy theories. The site also became known for its promotion of racist and sexist stereotypes".[49]
Some scientific studies have identifiedThe Daily Caller as an inaccurate newsource.[50][51][52] In an October 2018 (7 years old)Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations,The Daily Caller was ranked as the least trusted news organization by Americans, while others includedBuzzFeed,The Daily Beast,Mother Jones,Breitbart News, theDaily Kos, thePalmer Report,Occupy Democrats andInfoWars.[53]
In 2019,The Daily Caller, along withOne America News Network andThe Gateway Pundit, were categorized as unreliable sources of information by theWikipedia community,[54] with the consensus being thatThe Daily Caller "publishes false or fabricated information".[55]
In 2011,The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to disseminate aProject Veritas video by conservative provocateurJames O'Keefe which purportedly showed an NPR fundraiser deriding Republicans. The video was later proven to have been misleadingly edited. In February 2012,The Daily Caller conducted an "investigative series" of articles co-authored by Carlson, purporting to be an insiders' exposé ofMedia Matters for America (MMfA), a liberal watchdog group that monitors and scrutinizes conservative media outlets, and its founderDavid Brock.[56] Citing "current and former" MMfA employees, "friends" of Brock's and a "prominent liberal", the article characterized MMfA as having "an atmosphere of tension and paranoia" and portrayed Brock as "erratic, unstable and disturbing", who "struggles with mental illness", in fear of "right-wing assassins", a regular cocaine user and would "close [local bars] and party till six in the morning".
In August 2018,The Daily Caller ran a story alleging that a Chinese-owned company had hacked then-Secretary of StateHillary Clinton's private email server and successfully obtained nearly all of her emails, citing only, "two sources briefed on the matter". Trump retweeted the allegations made inThe Daily Caller's unsubstantiated reporting. TheFBI stated that there was no evidence to support the story.[57][58] In January 2019,The Daily Caller published a story with the misleading headline, "Here's The Photo Some Described as a Nude Selfie ofAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez". The photo was not of Ocasio-Cortez, however, and she condemnedThe Daily Caller's action as "completely disgusting behavior".[14]The Daily Caller apologized for the headline and changed it.[19]The Daily Caller said that the content of the story was not unlike stories published byVice andThe Huffington Post.[59]Vice had already reported that the photo in fact depicted Sydney Leathers, a political activist known for her sexting scandal with former congressman Anthony Weiner.[60]
In November 2012,The Daily Caller posted interviews with two women claiming that New JerseyDemocratic SenatorBob Menendez had paid them for sex while he was a guest of a campaign donor.[61] The allegation came five days before the2012 United States Senate election in New Jersey. News organizations such asABC News, which had also interviewed the women,The New York Times, and theNew York Post declined to publish the allegations, viewing them as unsubstantiated and lacking credibility.[11][62][63] Subsequently, one of the women who accused Menendez stated that she had been paid to falsely implicate the senator and had never met him.[62][64] Menendez's office described the allegations as "manufactured" by a right-wing blog as a politically motivated smear.[12]
A few weeks later, police in the Dominican Republic announced that three women had claimed they were paid $300–425 each to lie about having had sex with Menendez,[65] and alleged that the women had been paid to lie about Menendez by an individual claiming to work forThe Daily Caller. The website denied this allegation, stating: "At no point did any money change hands betweenThe Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation".[66] Describing what it saw as the unraveling ofThe Daily Caller' "scoop", thePoynter Institute wrote: "The Daily Caller stands by its reports, though apparently doesn't feel the need toprove its allegations right".[67]
In February 2017,Politico andBuzzFeed reported that Capitol Police accused five IT staffers forDemocrats in theU.S. House of Representatives of trying to steal House computer equipment and violating House security policies.[68][69][70] CongresswomanDebbie Wasserman Schultz was one of several House members who did not terminate the suspected staffers after the criminal complaints.[71] In July 2017, one of the accused staffers,Imran Awan, was arrested for making a false statement on a bank loan application.[72][73] After his arrest, Wasserman Schultz's office fired Awan.[74]
The Daily Caller pushed conspiracy theories about Awan,[75][76] seeking to tie Awan to many alleged criminal activities, including unauthorized access to government servers.[77] The reporter behind the coverage of Awan told Fox News that the affair was "straight out ofJames Bond".[77] An 18-month investigation by federal prosecutors found no evidence of wrongdoing in Awan's work in the House and no support for the conspiracy theories about Awan. In the announcement of the conclusion of the investigation, investigators rebuked a litany of right-wing conspiracy theories about Awan.[75][76]
The Daily Caller has been involved in several controversial incidents. In March 2015,The Daily Caller columnistMickey Kaus quit after editorTucker Carlson refused to run a column critical ofFox News coverage of the immigration policy debate.[78] Carlson, who worked for Fox News at the time, reportedly did not wantThe Daily Caller publishing criticism of a firm that employed him.[79]
In January 2017,The Daily Caller posted a video which encouraged violence against protesters.[80][81][82][83] The footage showed a car driving into demonstrators, with the headline "Here's A Reel of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying to Block the Road". The video clip was set to a cover of theLudacris song "Move Bitch".[80] The video clip drew attention in August 2017 after a white supremacistmurdered one counter-protester and injured 35 more by intentionally driving a car into them at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.[80] After the video attracted attention,The Daily Caller deleted it from its website.[80][83]
In 2018,The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to report onStefan Halper, a confidential FBI source, and his interactions with Trump campaign advisorsCarter Page andGeorge Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos later pleaded guilty to lying to theFBI about campaign matters.[84] Page became the subject of surveillance warrants issued by theUnited States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding contacts with Russian intelligence officials.[85] Other news outlets confirmed Halper's identity but did not report his identity because US intelligence officials warned that it would endanger him and his contacts.[86][87][88]
In 2020, duringThe Daily Caller''s coverage of protests inLouisville, Kentucky related to theshooting of Breonna Taylor and subsequent verdict on the police involved, two of their reporters were arrested and held overnight. Co-founder Patel threatened to take legal action against theLouisville Metro Police Department, citingfreedom of the press.[89][90]
According to a study byHarvard University'sBerkman Klein Center for Internet and Society,The Daily Caller was among the most popular right-wing news sites during the2016 United States presidential election. The study found thatThe Daily Caller provided "amplification and legitimation" for "the most extreme conspiracy sites", such asTruthfeed,InfoWars,The Gateway Pundit andConservative Treehouse.[91][92][93]The Daily Caller also "employedanti-immigrant narratives that echoed sentiments from the alt-right andwhite nationalists but without the explicitly racist and pro-segregation language".[92]
In one of its most frequently shared stories,The Daily Caller falsely asserted that Morocco'sKing Mohammed VI flewBill Clinton on a private jet, and that this had been omitted from theClinton Foundation's tax disclosures.[92]The Daily Caller also made the "utterly unsubstantiated and unsourced claim" thatHillary Clinton instructedEnvironmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson "to try to shut down Mosaic Fertilizer, described as America's largest phosphate mining company, in exchange for a $15 million donation to the Clinton Foundation from King Mohammed VI of Morocco, ostensibly to benefit Morocco's state-owned phosphate company".[92]
According to Callum Borchers ofThe Washington Post,The Daily Caller has "a peculiar business structure that enables it to increase revenue while reducing its tax obligation".[94] The organization, a for-profit company, does this by relying on its charity arm, the Daily Caller News Foundation, to create the majority of its news content.[95]
Lisa Graves of theCenter for Media and Democracy argues, "It's a huge rip-off for taxpayers if the Daily Caller News Foundation is receiving revenue that it doesn't pay taxes on, to produce stories that are used by the for-profit enterprise, which then makes money on the stories through ads". Benjamin M. Leff ofAmerican University writes, "But the fact that it also provides its content to other publishers for free is evidence that it is not operated for the private benefit of the for-profit, even if the for-profit is the dominant user of its content".[96]
Scott Greer was deputy editor and contributor atThe Daily Caller. After his departure in June 2018, it was revealed that he published articles espousingwhite nationalist,racist anti-black andantisemitic views under apseudonym in white supremacist publications.[17] In September 2018,The Atlantic reported that Greer had written pieces under the pseudonym "Michael McGregor" in thewhite supremacist publicationRadix Journal in 2014[18] and 2015. In articles forRadix Journal, Greer expressedwhite nationalist views, as well as racistanti-black andantisemitic views. In his emails and messages, he exchangedanti-Christian and antisemitic comments, with colleagues includingRichard Spencer.[17] After being confronted with his past white supremacist writings, Greer resigned from any affiliation withThe Daily Caller.[17] In 2017 it was revealed that Greer had ties to members of the white nationalist movement, including friendships with Devin Saucier, assistant toJared Taylor ofAmerican Renaissance, and anti-immigrant activist Marcus Epstein ofVDARE, who had pleaded guilty to assaulting an African-American woman two years prior to the beginning of his relationship with Greer.[97] Greer had later deleted parts of hisFacebook page, but is seen photographed with white nationalists such as Spencer, Tim Dionisopoulos, theWolves of Vinland, and also appears wearing clothes belonging to the groupYouth for Western Civilization.[98][97]The Daily Caller subsequently stated about why he had not been fired in 2017: "We had two choices: Fire a young man because of some photos taken of him at metal shows in college, or take his word. We chose to trust him. Now, if what you allege is accurate, we know that trust was a mistake, we know he lied to us. We won't publish him, anyone in these circles, or anyone who thinks like them. People who associate with these losers have no business writing for our company".[17]
Prior to June 2017,[99][18]The Daily Caller had published freelance articles byJason Kessler,[97] a white supremacist who organized theUnite the Right rally in August 2017 inCharlottesville, Virginia.[100][101][36] That rally took place while Kessler was suspended fromThe Daily Caller, afterProPublica had found that an article he had written forThe Daily Caller about a previous torchlight rally in Charlottesville in May 2017 had not disclosed that he made a speech at the event praising fascist and racist groups.[102][36] After the suspension,Daily Caller executive editor Paul Conner defended Kessler's article as accurate.[102][103]The Daily Caller deleted all of Kessler's articles from its website in August 2017 after the Unite the Right rally, which he had organized with Spencer and others, turned into deadly violence.[36]
Until 2017,[18] the website had also published pieces byPeter Brimelow, founder of the white supremacist website VDARE,[97][104] and by David Hilton, an anti-Semite who has pushed conspiracy theories that Israel was behind the9/11 attacks. In his articles forThe Daily Caller, Hilton promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories aboutGeorge Soros, as well as conspiracy theories about "Cultural Marxism".[18]
TheSouthern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported in 2017 thatThe Daily Caller had a "white nationalist problem", citing contributions by Kessler, Brimelow, Greer, and Ilana Mercer, whose writing onsupposed racially motivated crime in South Africa was also published on the white nationalist websiteAmerican Renaissance the same day it appeared inThe Daily Caller.[98] The SPLC retracted a claim about aDaily Caller reporter, Richard Pollock, stating that except for speaking at a 2017 event of the H.L. Mencken Club, considered a white nationalist group, "there is no evidence to suggest Mr. Pollock is otherwise a white nationalist";[98] in 2018, according to the SPLC, Pollock cancelled his scheduled attendance at the same group's event.[105]
The Daily Caller is in the White House rotatingpress pool and has full-time reporters on Capitol Hill.[106]
Contributors toThe Daily Caller have included economistLarry Kudlow, CongressmanMark Sanford, former Speaker of the HouseNewt Gingrich, former US Senate Candidate and JudgeJeanine Pirro, sculptorRobert Mihaly, diplomatAlan Keyes, political commentatorAnn Coulter, and theNRA-ILA.[114] Content has also been contributed to the site byLanny Davis, a former special counsel under Bill Clinton, and by political bloggerMickey Kaus,[1] who quit in 2015.[78]
The Daily Caller hostsThe Mirror, a blog written by former FishbowlDC editor andThe Hill columnist Betsy Rothstein.The Mirror coversmedia in Washington D.C., news related to journalism organizations, as well as political and media related gossip. The tagline is, "Reflections of a self-obsessed city".[115][116]
Billionaire and businessmanCharles Koch has made charitable donations to the Daily Caller News Foundation.[117]
In 2017,The Daily Caller launched a for-profit subsidiaryfact-checking website calledCheck Your Fact. In 2018, the site was approved byPoynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to become a fact-checking partner ofFacebook in 2019.[38][118][119] The website is editorially independent ofThe Daily Caller and has its own staff. Scientists and advocates have expressed concern that the partnership could be used to downplay climate articles on Facebook.[41]
The blow was undercut when The Blaze—yes, Glenn Beck's website—watched the raw tapes and proved the video the Caller posted was misleadingly edited.
In 2011, the site reported that the Environmental Protection Agency was preparing to hire more than 230,000 new employees, which would amount to a mind-boggling 1,300-percent growth in its workforce. It did not walk back the claim, even when it was shown to be untrue.
While we observe highly partisan and clickbait news sites on both sides of the partisan divide, especially on Facebook, on the right these sites received amplification and legitimation through an attention backbone that tied the most extreme conspiracy sites likeTruthfeed,InfoWars, through the likes ofGateway Pundit andConservative Treehouse, to bridging sites like theDaily Caller andBreitbart that legitimated and normalized the paranoid style that came to typify the right-wing ecosystem in the2016 election. [...] while right-wing sites likeBreitbart andThe Daily Caller link frequently to theNew York Times and theWashington Post, links in the other direction are vanishingly rare.
Examples of alt-right websites are Breitbart, Drudge Report, InfoWars, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, and WorldNetDaily.
... if you look at Wikipedia's guide to sources for its editors, you'll find that it holds the Daily Caller in even lower esteem than Fox News. The source is marked with a stop-sign icon, which indicates that it "publishes false or fabricated information".
Five House employees are under criminal investigation amid allegations that they stole equipment from more than 20 member offices and accessed House IT systems without lawmakers' knowledge...House sources stressed the investigation, which has been ongoing since late 2016, is focused on equipment theft and not a network hacking issue.
Although the lawmaker said House officials had told staff from affected offices that contractors had been arrested, late Thursday night US Capitol Police spokesperson Eva Malecki told BuzzFeed News that no arrests had been made, but that USCP was investigating members of the House IT support staff.
February: They are shared employees who work for 30 or so members of Congress. Capitol Police ban the five from access to the House of Representatives network while it investigates. Investigators tell lawmakers that it's up to them to decide whether to fire the accused staffers. Awan is one of those staffers accused. Most of the others are related to him, including his wife, Hina Alvi.
Imran Awan, a longtime House staffer who worked for more than two dozen Democrats since 2004, is still employed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, though his access to the House IT network has been blocked since last week.
Federal prosecutors concluded an 18-month investigation into a former congressional technology staffer on Tuesday by publicly debunking allegations — promoted by conservative media and President Trump — suggesting he was a Pakistani operative who stole government secrets with cover from House Democrats. As part of an agreement with prosecutors, Imran Awan pleaded guilty to a relatively minor offense unrelated to his work on Capitol Hill: making a false statement on a bank loan application. U.S. prosecutors said they would not recommend jail time.
While Awan's year-long court case revolved solely around bank fraud charges pertaining to an application for a home equity loan, conspiracy theorists have speculated wildly about the case. Blogs and conservative websites have circulated allegations that Awan was involved in the hack of the DNC computer systems in the run-up to the 2016 election and that he had stolen the Democrats' server and distributed sensitive information to the Pakistani government.
Awan was fired by Wasserman Schultz's office after Tuesday's arrest. 'Mr. Awan previously served as an employee in our office, but his services have been terminated,' said David Damron, her spokesperson.
Unity and Security for America is led by Jason Kessler, a local blogger who was recently fired by conservative website the Daily Caller for his support for white supremacist groups
