For four years, CNN ran endless “fact checking” pieces against President Donald Trump.
Then on January 20th, the fact checking at CNN suddenly stopped.
Now, the network is under fire for hypocritically giving Joe Biden a pass in ways they never would have for Trump.
Almost immediately after Donald Trump was sworn into office in 2017, CNN began running a series of “fact checking” pieces against the President.
Billed as an attempt by the media to hold America’s elected officials accountable for their words and actions, CNN’s fact checking quickly turned into a partisan crusade against the President, with even the most benign and mild statements from the President, his Press Secretary, or White House staff being “fact checked” by the mainstream media network.
This pattern lasted for nearly four years, with CNN eventually getting to the point of practically abandoning all semblances of objective journalism in favor of rating virtually every Trump administration statement they possibly could as false or misleading.
The network even brought on their own analyst, Daniel Dale, whose entire job was to fact check the Trump White House.
But now, Dale has seemingly fallen off the face of the earth in the weeks after Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“Dale became a veritable household name among cable news viewers during Trump’s presidency after his work for the Toronto Star, tallying and debunking false or misleading statements by Trump, landed him a national gig with CNN,” writes Mediaite when covering the demise of the CNN Presidential Fact Check.
According to statistics provided by Archive.org, which tracks web page histories even after they’ve been edited, CNN’s website has featured Dale in one way or another at a rate of over once per day since the network hired him in the summer of 2019.
This made Dale one of the most cited news personalities CNN would lean on, with the network turning to his fact checking of President Trump on a daily and even hourly basis for well over a year.
However, since January 20th when Joe Biden took office, the network has more or less abandoned the practice of fact checking the President altogether, with critics slamming the network for blatantly holding Presidents Trump and Biden to completely different standards.
“That exposure dropped sharply after November 4, and according to the TV Eyes media monitoring database, since President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, Dale has only appeared on the network once. And that appearance, last Friday, was to fact-check Donald Trump’s lawyers,” adds Mediaite.
What’s more, it appears as if Dale’s days working for CNN may be numbered, as the network is showing signs that it has little to no desire to hold President Biden to the same standards it held President Trump to for years.
“Dale is still doing presidential fact-checks, but they have thus far been relegated to CNN’s website. After a presidency that featured an average of 21 false or misleading claims per day over 4 years, according to The Washington Post, Dale seems to have his work cut out for him if he wants to remain a cable news fixture for the next four years,” concludes Mediaite.