Today's Deep Question: Where Is CNN's Fact-Checker on Trump?

hotair.com

And perhaps an even deeper question: Does anyone miss him?

My old friend Tommy Christopher first noticed Daniel Dale had gone AWOL on the Donald Trump fact-check watch last month. Dale still made appearances on CNN, but his last direct fact-check of Trump on air took place in February, shortly before CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) accepted the buyout offer from Paramount Skydance. Tommy noted that Dale's last appearance on air took place in early March on an issue that didn't involve Trump. He tweeted out these facts and called it a mystery:

Advertisement

He’s still doing fact checks. He’s done 16 in the past six or seven weeks. But nothing on the air.

He did one on Friday about the 28 lies Trump told last week. But that one didn’t make it on the air.

The New York Post picked it up on Thursday, which also noted Dale's long streak off of CNN's air. Like Tommy, they noted the interesting timing around this sudden disappearance:

Daniel Dale, a Canadian journo who built a national profile as fact-checker of President Trump and other politicians, has not appeared on CNN television in more than three months despite continuing to publish regular fact-checks for the network’s digital platforms.

Dale’s absence from the airwaves, which was first noticed by journalist Tommy Christopher and cited by the Status newsletter, came after the announcement for the merger between CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Skydance, which is run by Trump ally David Ellison.

The timeline has sparked speculation that Dale was sidelined by corporate leadership at CNN’s parent company as a way to placate Trump, whose administration must give final regulatory approval for Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of WBD.

CNN strongly denied such speculation from observers like Christopher.

Advertisement

Tommy wasn't convinced, and frankly, I can't blame him. Tommy followed up with an exclusive only available to his subscribers, but his intro suggests he was told something very, very different when his sources spoke off the record. 

Hey, remember about 2 weeks ago when I observed that CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale hadn’t been on the air to fact-check Trump for 3 months? And CNN wouldn’t say why?

Well, that wasn’t the full story — they just wouldn’t say on the record.

And me being a good guy, I didn’t use the stuff I was told before we made the off-the-record agreement. After all the fervent phone calls and vociferous things I couldn’t say, I asked how much of it I could use, and they were like none of it.

Apparently, that was enough to get Dale a slot on Jake Tapper's show yesterday, which led to this exchange today:

Again, the link goes to a subscriber-only page, which extends the mystery, at least a little. Don't begrudge Tommy that income stream, though: it's tough for independent journalists at all times, and his paywall is an absolute necessity. If he has a valuable scoop, Tommy is using the correct marketing strategy for it. 

Advertisement

Even without the specifics of his scoop, though, Tommy is correct that this is suspicious. There are three possibilities for this, none of which is "we're paying a dude to be on air but didn't have time for him for three months." One: CNN didn't want to antagonize Trump ahead of the merger approval at the DoJ, which came yesterday. Trump had made it clear for months that he was very interested in the outcome of the deal, but he was already clearly in favor of the Paramount acquisition over the Netflix bid. Dale seems like small potatoes when it comes to Trumpian ire, but Trump has had feuds with journalists for decades now. It's not impossible that this was the concern, but it seems less than likely. 

Two: CNN insiders were and are preparing for the Bari Weiss Era after Paramount won the bid for WBD. That may be a better explanation, but it seems unlikely that Weiss will concern herself with Dale or that CNN execs would worry about him more than their underperforming shows. Assuming she takes editorial control at CNN, her focus will start at the higher-level editorial positions and then show hosts and runners. Paid commentators will be far down her list. 

Three: CNN and/or Weiss has grown tired of on-air fact-checks, or at least has figured out that its audience no longer trusts fact-checkers. That's especially true of the tendentious and partisan fact-checkers, those who focus on Trump while largely letting Joe Biden and Democrats off the hook in the previous administration. CNN couldn't be bothered to pry into Joe Biden's obvious senility until after the June 2024 debate, and only began reporting on how well-known it was when they could sell books in Barnes & Noble's Now It Can Be Told section. The mainstream media made fact-checking into an utter joke, and it's basically a waste of airtime to put Dale on the air. It's probably a waste of pixels to put it on their digital platforms, but at least pixels are cheap. 

Advertisement

In truth, fact-checking got corrupted years ago for partisan purposes. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated its degradation as the media colluded with the government to shut down debate on social media platforms through media fact-checkers and other "misinformation" enforcement orgs that shut down rational debate over the policies adopted by bureaucrats, but it had already become a tool to shut down debate and argument well before that. 

Yesterday, I spoke with Matthew Hoy about his new book, Fact-Checking Frauds: How Fact-Checkers Distract, Deceive, and Distort Our Politics. The topic is so vast that we only had a chance to scratch the surface of Matthew's book, but we had a good conversation about the origins and promises of fact-checking ... and how it all went wrong. 


  •  One key issue: "The problem with fact-checkers is, by and large ... they're all journalists, and journalists are largely liberal."
  •  The "free money" problem: "When they were fact checking for meta, it's like every fact check they do gets the money. How much I don't know, but they get paid for them, which was why they did fact checks saying, no, Gavin Newsom isn't a lizard person. No, Queen Elizabeth II isn't a lizard person."
  •  The model problem: "You see in the international fact-checking network as kind of being a bad model versus the kind of old-style journalism where a beat reporter who covers that subject day in and day out, who knows all of the players, does a of a fact check analysis of, oh, this is the claim being made, and here's why it may be true, or maybe not true, or here are the differences.But that kind of fact-checking, which was the old school stuff that, that you and I grew up reading, and for me, doing some when I was a reporter and whatnot, back in the 80s and 90s and whatnot, that's what I think works. The stuff where someone flies in with no prior experience or no prior knowledge and determines something is true or false or pants on fire when there's a lot of nuance. And there's a fact checker who wants to can make just about any statement come down in the rankings any way they want."

    • Advertisement

    Be sure to buy the book and read it all. You can find Matthew at his Hoystory Substack, and the book's detailed notes at FactCheckingFrauds.com. 

    The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!

    Editor's Note: Do you enjoy HotAir's conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.

    Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.