Seen and Unseen: The return of CNN's fact-checker
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Two-and-a-half years into the Biden era, the number of CNN fact-checks of Donald Trump and Republican politicians continue to dwarf those of the current president.
CNN's chief fact-checker Daniel Dale hasn't published a fact-check of President Biden since March 30, according to his online database. Since that time, though, his database shows 21 bylined stories or on-air appearances that fact-checked claims made by Republicans, most of them by Trump, but also Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.
It's not uncommon to see the "Biden White House" page of the CNN fact-check site solely populated with fact-checks of the former president, not the current one.
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As of Thursday night, the four stories under that header were "Debunking Trump's blizzard of dishonesty about his federal indictment," "Trump's baseless ‘1,850 boxes’ attacks on Biden’s legal and normal University of Delaware documents collection," "Seven of Trump’s false or unsupported claims on the documents investigation," and "Trump boasts about a massive oil purchase that never happened."
Former President Donald Trump, left, takes the mic at a rally in Waco, Texas. President Biden speaks to reporters outside the White House. (Getty Images)
Dale, whose biography touts that he was the first media member to fact-check every false claim by Trump, has made a series of on-air appearances in recent days to check statements made by Trump related to his historic federal indictment for alleged mishandling of classified materials.
The four fact-checks under "Congress" are all about claims made by Republicans or Elon Musk, and just three of the last 24 listed under "More Fact Checks from CNN Politics" concern Biden; no other Democrats are listed, while Trump, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., are listed.
Recent claims by Biden, such as that he only has four granddaughters and that his son Beau died in Iraq – Beau passed away from glioblastoma in May 2015 and his father has said it may have been due to toxic burn pits while serving in Iraq – have not been subject to CNN fact-checking scrutiny.
The conservative Media Research Center's Tim Graham said Dale's Jeff Zucker-era hiring after his time fact-checking Trump at the Toronto Star made sense. While Trump was president, Dale was a constant fixture on CNN, but his appearances diminished after Biden took office, although the latter's supporters would say that's due to Biden being far less likely than Trump to make openly false statements in public.
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CNN's Daniel Dale has fact-checked Donald Trump far more than Joe Biden since the latter took office. (CNN screengrab)
"One of the reasons you can laugh at the phrase ‘independent fact-checkers’ is the obvious tilt in targeting. They may not be paid by the Democrats, but the target list makes it look like they are," Graham told Fox News Digital. "CNN's obsession over Trump always prompts the question ‘Who is the president now?’ Because CNN acts like Trump never lost. Joe Biden simply isn't someone powerful enough to evaluate."
On March 30, Biden was dinged by Dale for claiming Americans "aren’t allowed to own a machine gun or a flamethrower," noting that isn't true in most of the country. This year, he's also checked Biden's State of the Union address in February and some of the president's economic claims, but his overwhelming focus has been on Trump and the right.
In January 2022, Fox News Digital reported on a six-week gap in Dale's fact-checks of Biden, noting he had ignored false claims by the president in a landmark voting rights speech in Georgia. In September 2022, Fox News Digital reported it had been three months at that point since he'd penned a fact-check on Biden.
CNN FACT-CHECKER IGNORES BIDEN'S FALSE CLAIMS FROM GEORGIA VOTING SPEECH, CONTINUING TREND
DePauw University professor of communications Jeffrey McCall said Dale's title should be relabeled.
"Republicans, including Trump, of course, do indeed need to be fact-checked, but so do left-of-center politicians, who are very rarely the subjects of scrutiny," he told Fox News Digital. "A quick review of this fact-checker's stories shows an overwhelming number of reports against Republicans, and again, mainly Trump. And it's not like there aren't plenty of PR blurbs coming out of the White House that deserve to be fact-checked. In the name of transparency, CNN should just relabel this guy to call him an ‘activist fact-checker against the GOP,’ but then hire somebody else who can fact-check across the board."
Former President Donald Trump speaks at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., Tuesday, June 13, 2023, after pleading not guilty in a Miami courtroom earlier in the day to dozens of felony counts that he hoarded classified documents and refused government demands to give them back. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Dale didn't respond to a request for comment.
Since the firing of CEO Chris Licht last week, CNN has in some ways appeared to lurch back to its more editorial style that defined the tenure of Zucker. CNN's Jake Tapper scolded producers not to show Trump with supporters in Miami after his indictment, and media reporter Oliver Darcy took a shot at Licht for previously airing Trump remarks after he was charged in New York.
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