The Daily Caller
The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by political commentator Tucker Carlson and political advisor Neil Patel in 2010. Launched as a "conservative answer to The 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 by The New York Times as having been "a pioneer in online conservative journalism". As of 2025,The Daily Caller is a member of the White House press pool.
The Daily Caller has published false stories and declined to correct them when they were shown to be untrue. The website has published articles that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change. In 2018, the website cut ties with an editor linked to white supremacist causes. 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; 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.
In 2020, Carlson left the site, with Patel buying out Carlson's stake to become majority owner. Foster Friess, a major conservative donor also known for being an investment manager, remained a partial owner until his death in 2021.
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 in January 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" or The New York Times, similarly featuring sections in broad range of subjects beyond politics. When The Daily Caller launched in 2010, it became the third Washington, D.C.–based news site besides Talking Points Memo and Politico. Breitbart became one of the site's main competitors.In a 2010 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Carlson described The Daily Callers prospective audience as "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".
By late 2012, the site had quadrupled its page view and total audience and had become profitable without ever buying an advertisement for itself.
Vince Coglianese replaced Carlson as editor-in-chief in 2016 when the Tucker Carlson Tonight show began on Fox. Carlson departed the site in June 2020 to increase his focus on his new show. Patel brought in Omeed Malik as a new partner; a former hedge fund managing director and Muslim American Democrat, he was a donor to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The Daily Caller became a minority-owned and -run company thereafter. Friess remained a partial owner until his death in 2021.
In 2020, The New York Times noted that "several former Daily Caller reporters occupy prominent roles in Washington journalism," specifically noting CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and Daily Mail reporter David Martosko.
Political stances
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. "We're not going to suck up to people in power, the way so many have", Carlson said. 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".In a Washington Post article about The Daily Callers launch, Howard Kurtz wrote, " 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".
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 Callers reporting "the balance against the rest of the conventional press". 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".
In 2019, the Columbia Journalism Review described The Daily Caller as "right wing", a description also used by Business Insider, Snopes, and Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The Guardian in April 2019 said The Daily Caller was known for pro-Trump content. In 2020, Austrian social scientist Christian Fuchs of the University of Westminster described The Daily Caller as alt-right. A 2021 Politico article described The Daily Caller as "mainstream right", as opposed to more "conspiratorial fringe" outlets such as One America News Network. Other media outlets have referred to The Daily Caller as Conservative, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
Climate change
The Daily Caller has published articles that dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. According to Science magazine, The Daily Callers "climate reporting focuses on doubt and highlights data that suggests climate concerns from the world's leading science agencies and organizations are incorrect".The accuracy of certain articles published in the early-to-mid 2010s was particularly questioned, as with a 2011 article claiming that the United States Environmental Protection Agency 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 by The Daily Caller reflected the numbers that, according to Politifact 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". The story went viral in right-wing media, and was repeated by Republican politicians. Criticized articles on the subject later in the 2010s included the republication of a 2017 article published in Daily Mail which claimed that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated data to make climate change appear worse; other news outlets debunked the Daily Mail story. A 2018 story cited an Obama administration memo pushing authors of an EPA National 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".
Journalistic standards
Fact-checkers have frequently debunked Daily Caller stories.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. According to the Encyclopædia 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".
Some scientific studies have identified The Daily Caller as a fake news website. In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, The Daily Caller was ranked as the least trusted news organization by Americans, while others included BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Breitbart News, the Daily Kos, the Palmer Report, Occupy Democrats and InfoWars.
In 2019, The Daily Caller, along with One America News Network and The Gateway Pundit, were categorized as unreliable sources of information by the Wikipedia community, with The Daily Caller entry on the Perennial sources list stating that it "publishes false or fabricated information".
Specific incidents
In 2011, The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to disseminate a Project Veritas 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. In February 2012, The Daily Caller conducted an "investigative series" of articles co-authored by Carlson, purporting to be an insiders' exposé of Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group that monitors and scrutinizes conservative media outlets, and its founder David Brock. 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 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 State Hillary 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 in The Daily Callers unsubstantiated reporting. The FBI stated that there was no evidence to support the story. 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, however, and she condemned The Daily Callers action as "completely disgusting behavior". The Daily Caller apologized for the headline and changed it. The Daily Caller said that the content of the story was not unlike stories published by Vice and The Huffington Post. 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.