The Daily Caller

The Daily Caller
Type of site
 News, opinion
Available in English
Founded January 11, 2010 (2010-01-11)
Headquarters 1920 L Street NW Floor 2, Washington, D.C. 20036
Owner The Daily Caller, Inc.
Founder(s) Tucker Carlson
Neil Patel
Key people Tucker Carlson (Founder)
Neil Patel (Publisher)
Brian Danza (COO)
Geoff Ingersoll (Editor-in-Chief)[1]
Website dailycaller.com
Alexa rank Increase 785 (February 17, 2018)[2]
Advertising Native
Registration Optional, required to comment
Launched January 11, 2010 (2010-01-11)
Current status Online

The Daily Caller is a conservative American news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by political pundit Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel in 2010.

History

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 started with a reporting staff of 21 in its Washington office. It was launched as an alternative to the liberal The Huffington Post, similarly featuring sections in broad range of subjects beyond politics.

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.[3]

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.[4] The site has an active community, with over 200,000 comments made each month.

Notable figures have commented on The Daily Caller. 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."[4]

Staff and contributors

Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson

The Daily Caller is in the White House rotating press pool and has full-time reporters on Capitol Hill.[5] Notable contributors include Ann Coulter.[6]

Contributors to The Daily Caller include economist Larry Kudlow, Congressman Mark Sanford, sculptor Robert Mihaly, and diplomat Alan Keyes.[7][8][9]

The Daily Caller also hosts The Mirror, a blog written by former FishbowlDC editor and The Hill columnist Betsy Rothstein. The Mirror covers media 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."[10][11]

Political stance

When it first launched in January 2010, Mercedes Bunz, writing for The Guardian, said The Daily Caller was "setting itself up to be the conservative answer to The Huffington Post". According to Bunz, a year before the website launched, Carlson promoted it as "a new political website leaning more to the right than Politico and TalkingPointsMemo". However, at launch, he wrote a letter to readers that said it was not going to be a right-wing site.[12]

During a January 2010 interview with Politico, Carlson said The Daily Caller was not going to be tied to his personal political ideologies and that he wanted it to be "breaking stories of importance".[13] In a Washington Post article about The Caller's launch, Howard Kurtz wrote, "[Carlson's] partner is Neil Patel, a former Dick Cheney aide. His opinion editor is Moira Bagley, who spent 2008 as the Republican National Committee's press secretary. And his $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financier Foster 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".[14] In an interview with The New York Times, Carlson said that the vast majority of traditional reporting comes from a liberal point of view and called The Daily Caller's reporting "the balance against the rest of the conventional press".[3]

In a 2012 Washingtonian article, Tom Bartlett said Carlson and Patel developed The Daily Caller as "a conservative news site in the mold of the liberal Huffington Post but with more firearms coverage and fewer nipple-slip slide shows".[15]

Controversies

Climate change denial

The Daily Caller has published a number of articles that dispute the scientific consensus on climate change.[16] In 2017, The Daily Caller published a story saying that a "peer-reviewed study" by "two scientists and a veteran statistician" found that recent years have not been the warmest ever.[17][18] The alleged "study" was a PDF file on a WordPress blog, and was not peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.[17] That same year, 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.[19][20][21] That same year, 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.[16] 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 was unnecessary to measure climate change; Mann described the story as "egregiously false".[22] 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.[23][24]

Misleading video about NPR

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.[25]

False prostitution allegations

In March 2013 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.[26] 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.[27][28][29] Subsequently, one of the women who accused Menendez stated that she had been paid to falsely implicate the senator and had never met him.[27][30] Menendez's office described the allegations as "manufactured" by a right-wing blog as a politically motivated smear.[31]

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.[32] 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 Daily Caller 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".[33] Describing what it saw as the unraveling of The Daily Caller's "scoop", the Poynter Institute wrote: The Daily Caller stands by its reports, though apparently doesn't feel the need to prove its allegations right".[34]

Fox News controversy

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.[35] Carlson, who also works for Fox, reportedly did not want The Daily Caller publishing criticism of a firm that employed him.[36] Journalist Neil Munro quit two weeks later.[37]

2016 presidential election

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, 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] The Daily Caller also played a significant role in creating and disseminating stories that had little purchase outside the right-wing media ecosystem but that stoked the belief among core Trump followers that what Clinton did was not merely questionable but criminal and treasonous. In a campaign that expressed deep anti-Muslim sentiment, a repeated theme was that Hillary Clinton was seriously in hock to Muslim nations.[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 got 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]

Encouragement of violence against protesters

In January 2017, The Daily Caller posted a video which encouraged violence against protesters.[41][42][43][44] The video in question showed a car plowing through protesters, with the headline "Here's A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road" and set to a cover of Ludacris' "Move Bitch."[41] The video 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 Southern Poverty Law Center subsequently criticized The Daily Caller, saying that it had a "white nationalist problem".[45] SPLC also said that two other contributors to The Daily Caller had ties to white nationalist groups.[45] It later retracted its claim that Richard Pollock, a devout Jew, was a white nationalist, saying "Pollock was initially included in this story" but "there is no evidence to suggest Mr. Pollock is otherwise a white nationalist."[45]

Ties to white supremacists

In August 2018, The Atlantic reported that Scott Greer, then deputy editor of The Daily Caller, had written pieces under a pseudonym in the white supremacist publication Radix Journal from 2014 to 2015. In articles for Radix Journal, Greer expressed racist and antisemitic views. Upon being confronted with his past white supremacist writings, Greer resigned from any affiliation with The Daily Caller.[46] In 2017, it had been revealed, Scott Greer had ties to members of the white nationalist movement, including friendships with Devin Saucier, assistant to Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, and anti-immigrant activist Marcus Epstein, who pled guilty to assaulting an African American woman two years prior to the relationship with Scott Greer.[47] Greer had later deleted parts of his Facebook page, but is seen photographed with nationalists such as Tim Dionisopoulos and Richard Spencer, and appears wearing clothes belonging to the group Youth for Western Civilization.[47]

The Daily Caller has posted articles by Jason Kessler,[48] a white supremacist who organized a rally of hundreds of white nationalists in Charlottesville.[49][50] Before Kessler posted his article, he had spoken at white supremacist gatherings.[51] After Kessler received attention for his organizing of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, the Daily Caller removed his articles from its website,[52] but The Daily Caller executive editor defended Kessler's articles.[53]

The website has also published pieces by Peter Brimelow, founder of the white supremacist website VDARE.[47]

Heckling of Obama

In 2012, Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro heckled Barack Obama during one of the President's press conferences. Munro interrupted Obama while he was giving remarks. For a reporter to interrupt remarks by the president was considered startling and a breach of etiquette. Editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson defended Munro's actions, saying "As a general matter, reporters are there to ask [questions]" and that he was "proud" of Munro. Munro later said that he intended to ask questions after the president had made his remarks but that he misjudged when the president was closing his remarks.[54][55][56][57]

Stefan Halper

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. 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.[58][59][60]

Allegation of non-profit abuse

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."[61] 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.[62]

According to Lisa Graves, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration, the situation is “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.”[63]

Imran Awan

The Daily Caller kept conspiracy theories surrounding Imran Awan alive with aggressive coverage.[64][65] Imran Awan was an IT worker for Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Daily Caller sought to tie Awan to a wide range of alleged criminal activity, including unauthorized access to government servers.[66] The reporter behind the aggressive coverage of Awan told Fox News that the affair was "straight out of James Bond."[66] An 18-month investigation by federal prosecutors found no evidence of wrong-doing 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.[64][65]

Chinese email hacking

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 Daily Caller's reporting. The FBI rebutted the allegations.[67] According to The Washington Post, the claims are without evidence.[68]

Awards

References

  1. ↑ https://dailycaller.com/about-us/
  2. ↑ "DailyCaller.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved April 3, 2017.
  3. 1 2 Stelter, Brian (October 7, 2012). "Still a Conservative Provocateur, Carlson Angles for Clicks, Not Fights". The New York Times. Retrieved October 7, 2012.
  4. 1 2 "The Daily Caller". The Daily Caller. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  5. ↑ Calderone, Michael (February 1, 2010). "Daily Caller joins W.H. pool". Politico. Retrieved July 8, 2010.
  6. ↑ "About us". The Daily Caller. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
  7. ↑ "On Christian Political Apostasy As The Source Of America's Greatest Peril". The Daily Caller. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  8. ↑ "The Daily Caller". The Daily Caller. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  9. ↑ "Why Stopping Trump Is Of Utmost Importance". The Daily Caller. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  10. ↑ "Fishbowl's Betsy Rothstein to Daily Caller". POLITICO. Retrieved June 13, 2016.
  11. ↑ Beaujon, Andrew (November 7, 2013). "Betsy Rothstein, Washington's Strangest Gossip, Does Not Explain Washington". New Republic. Retrieved June 13, 2016.
  12. ↑ Bunz, Mercedes (January 11, 2010). "The Daily Caller: the conservative answer to the Huffington Post". The Guardian. London. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
  13. ↑ Calderone, Michael (January 11, 2010), "Tucker: 'Conventional journalism is no safer than a start-up'", Politico
  14. ↑ Kurtz, Howard (January 11, 2010). "Tucker's excellent adventure". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 27, 2010.
  15. ↑ Bartlett, Tom. "The Bearable Lightness of Being Tucker Carlson". The Washingtonian. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  16. 1 2 "Daily Caller uncritically reports poorly supported conclusion of satellite temperature study". Climate Feedback. December 4, 2017. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  17. 1 2 "FACT CHECK: Peer-Reviewed Study Proves All Recent Global Warming Fabricated by Climatologists?". Snopes.com. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  18. ↑ "Study Targets Adjusted Climate Data | The Daily Caller". archive.is. July 6, 2017. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  19. ↑ Nuccitelli, Dana (September 25, 2017). "The Mail's censure shows which media outlets are biased on climate change | Dana Nuccitelli". the Guardian. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  20. ↑ "Bogus Daily Mail Story Spearheads Latest Right-Wing Assault On Climate Change Science". Media Matters for America. February 7, 2017. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  21. ↑ "Whistleblower: NOAA Scientists Manipulated Temperature Data To Make Global Warming Seem Worse". dailycaller.com. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  22. ↑ Mann, Michael E. (July 15, 2016). "'Anatomy of a Smear' or 'How the Right Wing Denial Machine Distorts The Climate Change Discourse'". Huffington Post. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  23. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/chriscmooney. "Federal scientists say there never was any global warming "pause"". Washington Post. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  24. ↑ "Scientists Drop Science Bomb on Climate-Change Skeptics". Daily Intelligencer. Retrieved July 19, 2018.
  25. ↑ "The Great Right Hype". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved September 9, 2018.
  26. ↑ Boyle, Mathew (November 1, 2012) "Women: Sen. Bob Menendez paid us for sex in the Dominican Republic". The Daily Caller. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  27. 1 2 Schwartz, Rhonda (March 5, 2013). "Woman Says She Was Paid to Lie About Claim of Sex With Senator Menendez". ABC News. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  28. ↑ Lipton, Eric (February 16, 2013). "Inquiry on Democratic Senator Started With a Partisan Push". New York Times. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  29. ↑ Bump, Philip (March 8, 2013). "Daily Caller's Prostitution 'Scoop' Was So Thin Even the 'New York Post' Passed". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on June 30, 2009. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  30. ↑ Leonnig, Carol D.; Londoño, Ernesto (March 4, 2013). "Escort says Menendez prostitution claims were made up". Washington Post. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  31. ↑ Weiner, Rachel (January 30, 2013). "Menendez: Prostitution allegations 'manufactured' by 'right-wing blog'". Washington Post. Retrieved February 9, 2013.
  32. ↑ Coglianese, Vince (March 18, 2013). "Dominican police: Three women lied about sex with Menendez". The Daily Caller. Associated Press. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  33. ↑ Leonnig, Carol D.; Lazo, Luz (March 22, 2013). "Dominican official links Daily Caller to alleged lies about Menendez". Washington Post.
  34. ↑ Sonderman, Jeff (March 6, 2013). "The Daily Caller's Menendez prostitution 'scoop' unravels". Poynter Institute.
  35. ↑ Byers, Dylan (March 17, 2015). "Mickey Kaus quits Daily Caller after Tucker Carlson pulls critical Fox News column". Politico.
  36. ↑ Wemple, Erik (March 18, 2015). "Daily Caller's Tucker Carlson takes a stand for censorship". Washington Post.
  37. ↑ Byers, Dylan (March 31, 2015). "Neil Munro, reporter who heckled Obama, out at Daily Caller". Politico.
  38. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/aaronblakewp?fref=ts. "Analysis | Trump backers' alarming reliance on hoax and conspiracy theory websites, in 1 chart". Washington Post. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  39. 1 2 3 4 5 Yochai, Benkler,; Hal, Roberts,; M., Faris, Robert; Bruce, Etling,; Ethan, Zuckerman,; Nikki, Bourassa, (2017). "Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election".
  40. ↑ "Partisan right-wing websites shaped mainstream press coverage before 2016 election, Berkman Klein study finds". Harvard Gazette. August 16, 2017. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  41. 1 2 3 4 Kludt, Tom (August 15, 2017). "Fox News, Daily Caller delete posts encouraging people to drive through protests". CNNMoney. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  42. ↑ "Fox removes video with cars plowing through demonstrators". Philly.com. Archived from the original on August 16, 2017. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  43. ↑ "Daily Caller, Fox News Delete Video Celebrating 'Liberal Protesters' Getting 'Pushed Out of the Way by Cars'". Snopes.com. August 16, 2017. Retrieved August 18, 2017.
  44. 1 2 Rutenberg, Jim (August 17, 2017). "Where Is the Line? Charlottesville Forces Media and Tech Companies to Decide". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 18, 2017.
  45. 1 2 3 "The Daily Caller has a White Nationalist Problem". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved August 18, 2017.
  46. ↑ Gray, Rosie (September 5, 2018). "A Daily Caller Editor Wrote for an 'Alt-Right' Website Using a Pseudonym". The Atlantic. Retrieved September 6, 2018.
  47. 1 2 3 The Daily Caller has a white nationalist problem August 21, 2017, STEPHEN PIGGOTT, ALEX AMEND, Salon
  48. ↑ The Daily Caller has a white nationalist problem August 21, 2017, STEPHEN PIGGOTT • ALEX AMEND, Salon
  49. ↑ "The Daily Caller is just fine with publishing white supremacists". New Republic. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  50. ↑ "Here's what we know about the 'pro-white' organizer of 'Unite the Right,' who was chased out of his own press conference". Business Insider. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  51. ↑ Thompson, A.C. (May 31, 2017). "A Few Things Got Left Out of The Daily Caller's Report on Confederate Monument Rally". ProPublica. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  52. ↑ "The Daily Caller Removes 'Unite the Right' Organizer Jason Kessler's Bylines From Web Site". Snopes.com. August 14, 2017. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  53. ↑ "Right-Wing Media Provided Home For White Supremacist Before He Organized Charlottesville Rally". August 15, 2017.
  54. ↑ "Obama interrupted by heckling reporter". POLITICO. Retrieved May 11, 2018.
  55. ↑ Flock, Elizabeth (June 15, 2012). "VIDEO: Obama Heckled By Daily Caller Reporter During Immigration Speech In Rose Garden". U.S. News.
  56. ↑ "Reporter Heckles President Obama, Asks Why He 'Favors Foreign Workers' (Video)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved May 11, 2018.
  57. ↑ Braiker, Brian (June 15, 2012). "Daily Caller reporter interrupts Obama's Rose Garden statement". the Guardian. Retrieved May 11, 2018.
  58. ↑ Zapotosky, Matt; Kim, Seung Min; Leonnig, Carol D.; Barrett, Devlin (May 21, 2018). "White House plans meeting between intelligence officials and GOP lawmakers on FBI source". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
  59. ↑ Hart, Benjamin. "The FBI's Trump Campaign Informant: What You Need to Know". Daily Intelligencer. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
  60. ↑ "Was there really a federal spy inside the Trump campaign?". NBC News. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
  61. ↑ Borchers, Callum (June 2, 2017). "Analysis | Charity doubles as a profit stream at the Daily Caller News Foundation". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved June 18, 2018.
  62. ↑ "Exposed: Tucker Carlson, His "Charity," and the Trump Campaign Cash He Didn't Tell FOX Viewers About - EXPOSEDbyCMD". EXPOSEDbyCMD. June 1, 2017. Retrieved June 18, 2018.
  63. ↑ Borchers, Callum (June 2, 2017). "Analysis | Charity doubles as a profit stream at the Daily Caller News Foundation". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved June 19, 2018.
  64. 1 2 "Ex-congressional IT staffer reaches plea deal that debunks conspiracy theories about illegal information access". Washington Post. Retrieved July 3, 2018.
  65. 1 2 Leary, Alex. "Federal prosecutors debunk conspiracy theory involving ex-Wasserman Schultz aide". Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved July 3, 2018.
  66. 1 2 Cameron, Dell. "Feds Debunk IT Staffer Conspiracy Theory Pushed by The Daily Caller and Trump". Gizmodo. Retrieved July 3, 2018.
  67. ↑ "FBI rebuts Trump tweet about China hacking Hillary Clinton's email". NBC News. Retrieved August 29, 2018.
  68. ↑ "Trump, without citing evidence, says China hacked Hillary Clinton's emails". Washington Post. Retrieved August 29, 2018.
  69. ↑ "List of 2012 Edward R. Murrow Award winners". Radio Television Digital News Association.
  70. ↑ "List of American Legion Fourth Estate Award winners".
  71. ↑ "List of Telly Award winners".
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.