The Daily Caller

The Daily Caller was founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. After raising $3 million in funding from businessman Foster 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 to The Huffington Post", similarly featuring sections in broad range of subjects beyond politics. When The Daily Caller launched in 2010, it became the third Washington DC based news site besides Talking Points Memo and Politico.[7]

In a 2010 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Tucker Carlson described The 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 all birthers, they're all crazy, they're upset about fluoride in the water, probably racist. And those assumptions have prevented good journalism from taking place."[8]

By late 2012, The New York Times reported that the site had quadrupled its page view and total audience and had become profitable without ever buying an advertisement for itself.[9] By 2013, the site was receiving over 35 million views a month according to Quantcast, surpassing rival sites such as The Washington Times, Politico, and Forbes.[10] The site has an active community, with over 200,000 comments made each month.

According to the 2018 book Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, written by Harvard University scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, The Daily Caller fails to follow journalistic norms in its reporting.[11]

Vince Coglianese replaced Carlson as editor-in-chief in 2016[12] when the Tucker Carlson Tonight show started up on Fox. Carlson departed the site in June 2020 to increase his focus on his new show.[13] Karl Rove has said that "The Daily Caller is necessary reading for anyone who wants to be up to speed with what's going on with politics in America." Larry Kudlow referred to the site as "one of [his] faves."[10] Fact-checkers have frequently debunked Daily Caller stories.[14]

In 2017, the Daily Caller launched its fact-checking news site CheckYourFact.com. In 2018, the site was approved by Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)[15] and became a fact-checking partner of Facebook in 2019.[14][16]

In 2011, The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to disseminate a video by conservative provocateur James O'Keefe which purportedly showed an NPR fundraiser deriding Republicans. The video was later proven to have been misleadingly edited.[17]

In February 2012, The Daily Caller published an "investigative series" of articles co-authored by Carlson, purporting to be an insiders' exposé of Media Matters for America (MMfA), a liberal watchdog group that monitors and scrutinizes conservative media outlets, and its founder David Brock.[18] Citing "current and former" MMfA employees, "friends" of Brock's and a "prominent liberal" — none of whom are named — the article characterized MMfA as having "an atmosphere of tension and paranoia" and portraying 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." Reuters media critic and libertarian Jack Shafer sharply criticized The Daily Caller piece as "anonymously sourced crap," adding "Daily Caller is attacking Media Matters with bad journalism and lame propaganda". Shafer said that he had "never thought much of Media Matters' style of watchdogging or Brock's journalism".[19]

In 2012, Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro interrupted President Barack Obama during one of his press conferences, while Obama was giving remarks. Obama said, "The next time I prefer you let me finish my statements before you ask a question." Cutting off Munro's reply, Obama said, "I didn't ask for an argument."[20] Munro's interruption of remarks by the president was widely considered a startling breach of etiquette. Editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson defended Munro's heckling, saying "As a general matter, reporters are there to ask [questions]" and that he was "proud" of Munro.[21][22][23][24][25]

Munro later said in a statement that his intention was to ask questions after the president made his remarks, but he claimed to have misjudged when the president was closing. "I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States. I know he rarely takes questions before walking away from the podium. When I asked the question as he finished his speech, he turned his back on the many reporters, and walked away while I and at least one other reporter asked questions."[20][26]

In November 2012, The Daily Caller posted interviews with two women claiming that New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez had paid them for sex while he was a guest of a campaign donor.[27] The allegation came five days before the 2012 New Jersey senate election. News organizations such as ABC News, which had also interviewed the women, The New York Times, and the New York Post declined to publish the allegations, viewing them as unsubstantiated and lacking credibility.[28][29][30] Subsequently, one of the women who accused Menendez stated that she had been paid to falsely implicate the senator and had never met him.[28][31] Menendez's office described the allegations as "manufactured" by a right-wing blog as a politically motivated smear.[32]

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.[33] Dominican law enforcement also alleged that the women had been paid to lie about Menendez by an individual claiming to work for The Daily Caller. The website denied this allegation, stating: "At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation".[34] Describing what it saw as the unraveling of The Daily Caller' "scoop", the Poynter Institute wrote: "The Daily Caller stands by its reports, though apparently doesn't feel the need to prove its allegations right".[35]

In March 2015, The Daily Caller columnist Mickey Kaus quit after editor Tucker Carlson refused to run a column critical of Fox News coverage of the immigration policy debate.[36] Carlson, who works for Fox News, reportedly did not want The Daily Caller publishing criticism of a firm that employed him.[37]

According to a study by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, The Daily Caller was among the most popular sites on the right during the 2016 presidential election. The study also found that The Daily Caller provided "amplification and legitimation" for "the most extreme conspiracy sites", such as Truthfeed, InfoWars, The Gateway Pundit and Conservative Treehouse during the 2016 presidential election.[38][39][40] The Daily Caller also "employed anti-immigrant narratives that echoed sentiments from the alt-right and white nationalists but without the explicitly racist and pro-segregation language."[39]

In one of its most frequently shared stories, The Daily Caller falsely asserted that Morocco's King Mohammed VI flew Bill Clinton on a private jet, and that this had been omitted from the Clinton Foundation's tax disclosures.[39] The Daily Caller also made the "utterly unsubstantiated and unsourced claim" that Hillary Clinton instructed Environmental 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."[39]

In January 2017, The Daily Caller posted a video which encouraged violence against protesters.[41][42][43][44] The footage showed a car plowing through 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 Ludacris' "Move Bitch."[41] This Daily Caller stub drew attention in August 2017 when a white supremacist plowed his car through a group of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.[41] After the video attracted attention, The Daily Caller deleted it from its website.[41][44]

The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to report on Stefan Halper, a confidential FBI source, and his interactions with Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about campaign matters.[45] Page became the subject of surveillance warrants issued by the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding contacts with Russian intelligence officials.[46] 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.[47][48][49]

In August 2018, The Daily Caller ran a story alleging that a Chinese-owned company hacked then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and successfully obtained nearly all of her emails. The Daily Caller cited “two sources briefed on the matter.” After publishing the story, President Trump tweeted the allegations made in The Daily Caller's unsubstantiated reporting. The FBI said any evidence was absent.[50][51]

The Daily Caller pushed conspiracy theories about Imran Awan, an IT worker for Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.[52][53] The Daily Caller sought to tie Awan to many alleged criminal activities, including unauthorized access to government servers.[54] The reporter behind the coverage of Awan told Fox News that the affair was "straight out of James Bond."[54] 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.[52][53]

In January 2019, The Daily Caller published a story with the misleading headline "Here's The Photo Some Described As A Nude Selfie Of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez." The photo was not of Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez condemned The Daily Caller's action as "completely disgusting behavior."[55] The Daily Caller apologized for the headline, and changed it.[56] The Daily Caller said that the content of the story was not unlike stories published by Vice and The Huffington Post.[57] Vice had published an article debunking that the photo belonged to Ocasio-Cortez.[58]

In June 2020, attorneys for the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates secretly paid writers to promote AML Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency endorsed by Abramoff. The description of one article alleged to be part of the scheme matched a piece by Derek Hunter, a writer and podcast host for The Daily Caller. Hunter resigned from The Daily Caller while denying that he had been paid illicitly for any articles.[59]

During The Daily Caller's coverage of protests in Louisville, Kentucky related to the shooting of Breonna Taylor and subsequent verdict on the police involved, two of their reporters were arrested, prompting co-founder Patel to threaten a lawsuit against the Louisville Metro Police Department.[60][61]

According to Callum Borchers of The Washington Post, The Daily Caller has "a peculiar business structure that enables it to increase revenue while reducing its tax obligation."[72] 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.[73]

Lisa Graves of the Center 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 of American 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."[74]

The Daily Caller has published articles that dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. According to Science 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."[85]

In 2017, The Daily Caller published a story falsely claiming that a "peer-reviewed study" by "two scientists and a veteran statistician" found that recent years have not been the warmest ever.[86][87] The alleged "study" was a PDF file on a WordPress blog, and was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal.[86] Also in 2017, The Daily Caller uncritically published a bogus Daily Mail story which claimed that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) manipulated data to make climate change appear worse; at the same time, legitimate news outlets debunked the Daily Mail story,[88][89] as did Media Matters.[90] Also in 2017, The Daily Caller published a story claiming that a study found no evidence of accelerating temperatures over a 23-year period, which climate scientists described as a misleading story.[91] In 2016, The Daily Caller published a story claiming that climate scientist Michael Mann (director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University) had asserted that data are unnecessary to measure climate change; Mann described the story as "egregiously false".[92] In 2015, The Daily Caller wrote that NOAA "fiddle[d]" with data when the agency published a report concluding that there was no global warming hiatus.[93][94]

In 2011, the Daily Caller published a false story claiming that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was going to spend $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.[95][96][97][98] The story went viral in right-wing media,[95] and Republican politicians repeated the story.[97] Other news outlets noted that the story was false, but The Daily Caller stood by the story.[95] Adweek reported that the decision of David Martosko, executive editor at The Daily Caller, to stand by the story caused dismay among some the website's staff, who believed the decision undermined the credibility of the outlet.[99]

In 2018, after a National Climate Assessment report about the impact of climate change in the United States was released by the Trump administration (which had been in the works for several years, stretching into the Obama presidency), Trump's EPA dismissed the report's findings. Trump's EPA falsely claimed that the Obama administration had pushed the authors of the report to focus on the worst-case scenario. In doing so, the EPA cited a Daily Caller story. FactCheck.Org wrote about The Daily Caller story that there was no evidence for the claims made, the report focused both on lower and higher scenarios, and much of the report looked at climate change impacts that had already occurred. FactCheck.Org noted that the report underwent multiple reviews, both internally and externally, and that the report was available for public review for a period of three months. The Daily Caller cited as evidence for its claims a memo that allegedly showed that the Obama administration pushed the authors of the report to include worst-case scenarios; FactCheck.Org noted the memo "does not show that the Obama administration pushed for certain scenarios."[100]