CNN Responds to Speculation Daniel Dale Is Being Sidelined to Placate Trump

Screenshot via CNN.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego Daniel Dale?

CNN’s resident fact-checker has been a familiar sight on the network for years, his bespectacled face popping up to rattle off a brisk-yet-calm dissection of the latest claims by President Donald Trump and other key political figures.

Dale is a regular presence on social media too, posting nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day, to drop his fact checks, often accompanied by in-depth analytical articles for CNN’s website.

But he has not been seen on CNN, as on the television channel, in months.

Dale’s unusual absence was flagged by Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher on May 28, in a Substack post that noted “the undisputed king of cataloging Trump’s lies” had not been on CNN since mid-March, and had not done a true fact check segment since shredding Trump’s State of the Union speech in February — a stark drop from his “average of about a dozen TV appearances per month.”

Christopher reached out to CNN for comment at the time, but “they declined to provide any information on the record,” he wrote.

Wednesday evening, Natalie Korach, media correspondent for Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, reported some updates on “The Curious Disappearance of Daniel Dale.”

Korach’s review clocked the same last two appearances by Dale on CNN that Christopher had found, noting that Dale’s “trademark rapid-fire fact checks” had otherwise been missing from the airwaves.

Dale had moved back to Toronto last year, Korach noted, but CNN regularly has contributors and guests join their broadcasts from all over the planet; a metropolitan area like Canada’s most populous city should be no problem.

He “has continued to publish fact checks for CNN’s online operation and appeared in some short-form digital videos produced by the network,” but “the timing has raised questions,” Korach wrote, citing Paramount’s planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.

Last year’s merger between Paramount and Skydance has sparked a series of controversies and criticisms over concerns that new company chief David Ellison, along with his hand-picked CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, have been overly meddlesome with the journalistic endeavors by the media conglomerate’s reporters. It’s been widely speculated that 60 Minutes settled a lawsuit with the president that many legal analysts assessed as weak because Paramount did not want to ruffle the feathers of Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr, who had to give his stamp of approval for the merger to go through.

Paramount announced its plans to scoop up Warner Bros. Discovery two days after Dale’s February fact check, an evisceration of Trump’s State of the Union address, Korach pointed out, which could be “entirely coincidental” timing but Dale’s starkly reduced television appearances have “fueled speculation about why the previously visible fact-checker has abruptly disappeared from CNN’s airwaves” and “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.”

“CNN flatly disputed any suggestion that Dale has been sidelined as a result of the merger,” Korach wrote, acknowledging there was “no evidence” linking Dale’s television schedule change to the merger.

A CNN spokesperson provided the following statement to Mediaite (exactly the same statement as was provided to Status):

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.

Still, Korach wrote, there is “particular sensitivity” on this issue because of Trump’s well-documented hostility towards being fact-checked, especially with the increased “extraordinary pressure his administration is putting on media companies” in his second term, including how he has “repeatedly punished news outlets through lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, and public attacks, in an effort to intimidate journalists and chill speech.”

“Dale’s absence is certain to be welcomed by the White House,” regardless of the reason why, wrote Korach, and Trump’s voracious appetite for cable news means that’s the medium on which the president would have been most likely to have encountered Dale’s rebuttals to his claims.

So while Dale is still very much working diligently “scrutinizing” Trump’s ongoing commentary, predictions, promises, and claims — Korach highlighted “multiple fact-checks for CNN’s digital platforms and short-form video explainers distributed online” Dale published this week — “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.”

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