Right-Wing Daily Caller Idiots Prove They Don’t Understand Journalism

The Daily Caller is a right-wing outlet that publishes a litany of content that aligns with the goals of the billionaires who run the Republican Party. What a coincidence! All you really need to know about the site is this line from its Wikipedia and the corresponding citations.

 The Daily Caller has published stories claimed by some to be false and declined to correct them when they were shown to be untrue.

It was founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel as a so-called conservative answer to The Huffington Post, and Republican mega-donor Foster Friess supplied its initial $3 million investment. Like its right-wing compatriots Breitbart and its acolytes, The Daily Caller prioritizes whipping its audience into a fit of rage over doing any kind of real journalism.

That I can dunk on them like this only using their own article is another data point in a long line of them demonstrating how these people are both fundamentally untrustworthy and impossibly stupid. Per The Daily Caller:

A voicemail transcript obtained by the Daily Caller shows that Washington Post reporter Beth Reinhard called to harass the wife of a military veteran who served with Republican Montana Senate Candidate Tim Sheehy after the veteran refused to participate in an alleged hit piece on Sheehy.

Man that sounds really bad. Harassing the wife of a military veteran while trying to get dirt on a politician they’re one degree removed from is ugly, they must have some really damning proof huh? Let’s go back to these doofuses who belong in an adult daycare, not the White House press corps.

“Hi this is Beth Reinhard I’m a reporter with the Washington Post. I’m so sorry to bother you. I guess I’m trying to reach probably your spouse [redacted] and I wasn’t sure if I had the right number and I guess I don’t but if you could pass this message to him I would be super grateful,” the voicemail transcript obtained by the Daily Caller reads. “I’m working on a story about, profile, of Tim Sheehy, who knew your husband at the Naval Academy, and we just wanted to know, hoping to talk to him about his experience.”

“Any recollections of his time with him would be just great to help fill out what we know about his background. This is my phone at the office it’s [redacted] and again my name is Beth Reinhard at the Washington Post, working on a story about Tim Sheehy.”

Holy cow what incendiary harassment. I had to shield my eyes reading that and then walk away from my computer for a while it was so heinous. I’m still shaking with rage. Who does The Washington Post think they are opening with such a hostile line like “I’m so sorry to bother you.” I hope The Daily Caller provides their writers with access to good therapists so they can properly unpack this trauma that will take decades to fully heal from.

We here at Splinter are certainly no fans of much of the mainstream media and have already detailed some high-profile failures in our short time since we re-launched the site, and there are plenty of critiques to be made of how they report the news. This is, uh, not one of them. This is so far removed from anything offensive it’s actually a little shocking The Daily Caller put themselves out on a limb like this, but I guess that’s on me for believing that they have any kind of standards based in objective reality.

Say what you will about these schmucks, but they do know how to game the system. They did get a White House press pass after all, and have famous alumni like CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in the mainstream media. One thing that makes these right-wing billionaire blogs so dangerous is how much credibility the Beltway provides to fundamentally disingenuous actors. Biden’s White House thanking The Daily Caller for retracting a false story last week is a classic “you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to ISIS” moment.

Lecturing The Daily Caller about journalism is like explaining how to win a professional wrestling match to a toddler. It fundamentally misunderstands the staged nature of what is happening, and the subject does not even have the mental capacity to understand the concept.

That Tim Sheehy is the assumed front-runner in Montana’s Senate race and he admitted he lied to a ranger about the 2015 gunshot wound at the center of this story is immaterial to what these billionaire bootlickers are trying to do. That they saw fit to publish an exceedingly polite voicemail both speaks to how deranged they are and how little they care about maintaining any kind of shared reality with the rest of us. Their job is to elect Republicans, not to communicate any kind of accurate depiction of the world to their audience.

In the right-wing fever swamp, grievance is the only accepted currency, and whether there is any logic underlying that grievance is not even a consideration. The goal here is to push an unhinged billionaire agenda, and it is only thing The Daily Caller is good at.