What To Know
- CNN has denied speculation that fact-checker Daniel Dale was taken off air to appease President Trump.
- The Canadian journalist has not appeared on CNN since mid-March.
- Dale continues to provide fact-checks for CNN’s digital platforms.
CNN has denied speculation that fact-checker Daniel Dale has been sidelined to appease President Donald Trump amid Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
The Canadian journalist has been a regular on CNN over the past few years, often delivering rapid-fire fact-checks on the latest claims by the president and other political figures. Since June 2019, he has written the “Facts First” column for CNN Politics and has frequently appeared on air to dissect Trump’s claims.
However, Dale has not been seen on CNN since mid-March, per Mediaite, and has not done a true fact-check segment on-air since he pulled apart Trump’s State of the Union speech in February.
On Wednesday (June 10), Natalie Korach, media correspondent for Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, reached out to CNN to ask why Dale hasn’t been used on air since March. Korach pointed out the timing “raised questions,” citing Paramount’s upcoming merger with CNN’s parent company, WBD, which requires federal approval.
The Paramount-WBD deal was announced two days after Dale’s February fact-check. While Korach said this could be “entirely coincidental,” she noted that it “raised some eyebrows at a moment when corporate media outlets are under a microscope for bending the knee to Trump as he intensifies his unprecedented assault on the press.”
This follows the recent upheaval at CBS News, also owned by Paramount, and accusations that the network is trying to placate the president. Earlier this month, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was fired from the show after speaking out against his new bosses. This came after the firing of the show’s executive producers, Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailovich, as well as correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi.
CNN responded to the speculation about Dale, saying, “There is no truth to this. Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact checks of the president are an important part of CNN’s political coverage. Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day — any suggestion otherwise is false.”
As Korach noted, Dale continues to provide fact-checks on CNN’s digital platforms and in short-form videos. However, “for more than three months, CNN’s television audience has largely gone without the reporter most closely associated with challenging Trump’s falsehoods on air. And one particularly devoted viewer of cable news—the president himself—hasn’t seen him either.”
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
