MSNBC host Chris Hayes dedicated a segment on his show All In to go after the popular news and opinion site The Daily Caller. Hayes tied in his attack on the news outlet with his ongoing smear campaign against Fox News and their most popular host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson. Hayes even managed to say with a straight face that The New York Times “is not a liberal paper.”
After airing a portion of Carlson’s 2009 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in which he explained the need for a conservative version of liberal The New York Times, Hayes took issue with Carlson’s characterization of the so-called paper of record in New York City.
“I disagree vehemently with Tucker Carlson's assessment of bias at The New York Times, it is not a liberal paper,” Hayes insisted.
He went on to explain that Carlson’s “big project at the moment that he was launching was a website called The Daily Caller. It was going to be his conservative answer to The New York Times.”
“Spoiler alert, it didn't work,” Hayes gloated.
In reality, there’s no evidence that The Daily Caller was specifically intended to be the conservative alternative to The New York Times. Tucker was speaking generally when he spoke at CPAC in 2009 about the need for a conservative alternative. The Daily Caller wasn't launched until over a year later.
According to an article in The Guardian, The Daily Caller was set up as the conservative answer to The Huffington Post.
Regardless, The Daily Caller has been enormously successful in what it was set out to do. It reports real news and is widely read.
Hayes then read an excerpt from the leftwing New Republic that attempted to smear both The Daily Caller and Carlson:
[W]hen he launched The Daily Caller in 2010, Carlson vowed it would primarily be a news site, with a straightforward approach to the news. Find out what's happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply. There wasn't an audience. Within a few months, it was publishing fake news and outrage driven commentary.
Hayes went on to falsely claim that “The Daily Caller became virtually indistinguishable from fringe far-right outlets like Breitbart.”
The truth is that while The Daily Caller does publish some conservative commentary pieces and other original content, they have strict journalistic and ethical standards.
Their news stories are always fact based and unbiased. Their opinion pieces are clearly labeled opinion so readers know it's not a straight news piece. Which is something Chris Hayes is obviously unfamiliar with.
This smear against The Daily Caller was made possible by Chase. Their information is linked so you can contact them.
The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:
MSNBC’s All In
3/8/2023
8:23:34 p.m. EasternTUCKER CARLSON: If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it's also, and it’s to its core a liberal paper, it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right, by and large. It's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions. That are—That's the truth. You don't believe me? The New York Times? You don't think—?
CHRIS HAYES: The boos. The boos. Now, I disagree vehemently with Tucker Carlson's assessment of bias at The New York Times, it is not a liberal paper. His point though that the political right lacks credible journalism is well taken. That video right there of Tucker getting booed at CPAC for having the temerity to say this obvious truth, might as well be his villain origin story.
He had just come off a series of professional humiliations. His second cable news show at as many networks had recently been canceled. So Carlson was looking to pursue a new venture. His big project at the moment that he was launching was a website called The Daily Caller. It was going to be his conservative answer to The New York Times.
The kind of project he tried to soft launch at CPAC a year prior. Spoiler alert, it didn't work. As Alex Shephard writes at the New Republic, when he launched The Daily Caller in 2010, Carlson vowed it would primarily be a news site, with a straightforward approach to the news. Find out what's happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply. There wasn't an audience. Within a few months, it was publishing fake news and outrage driven commentary.
The transformation of The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment of Carlson’s career. A period during which he learned his lesson. He never sought respectability again. In hindsight, that CPAC speech you heard a moment ago was a harbinger of what was to come. And not just about these particular characters in this story. It's about the entire epistemic universe that almost half the country exists in.
The audience booing Tucker for daring to suggest the right should care about accurate news shows how little appetite there was for that kind of fact based reporting. Tucker learned where the money was. The Daily Caller became virtually indistinguishable from fringe far-right outlets like Breitbart.
