The Daily Caller

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.

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

Notable figures have commented on The Daily Caller. Karl Rove 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 my faves."

Staff and contributors

The Daily Caller is in the White House rotating press pool and has full-time reporters on Capitol Hill. Notable staff and columnists include Ann Coulter and Ginni Thomas. In addition to these columnists, The Daily Caller has many contributors for a variety topics, including many prominent politicians, businessmen and academics. Formerly, bloggers included The Week contributing editor Matt K. Lewis and Matt Labash.

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

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." DC Trawler is a blog by polical humorist Jim Treacher.

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. 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 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". 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".

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 February 2012, an internet marketing research firm found that a majority (64.8 percent) of The Daily Caller's site visitors to be self-identified political Republicans; of the remaining visitors, independents outnumbered Democrats 26.8 percent to 8.6 percent.

Disputed 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. 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. Subsequently, one of the women who accused Menendez stated that she had been paid to falsely implicate the senator and had never met him. Menendez's office described the allegations as "manufactured" by a right-wing blog as a politically motivated smear.

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

Fox News controversy

In March 2015 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. Carlson, who also works for Fox, reportedly did not want the Caller publishing criticism of a firm that employed him. Journalist Neil Munro quit two weeks later.

Awards