Oliver Darcy, the conservative wunderkind turned Jeff Zucker lapdog, has decided in the last year or so that his chief mission in life is to hold conservative-friendly media organizations accountable. Problem is, he’s not very good at it — as evidenced by his latest attacks on The Daily Caller’s reporting over the Stormy Daniels controversy.
As the drama continues to erupt between the former porn star and President Donald Trump, Darcy thought the real story was about how much coverage outlets like Fox News and The Daily Caller were giving it.
His Thursday piece “Pro-Trump media sweeps Stormy Daniels story under rug,” accused TheDC of a “blackout.” His evidence? The supposed fact that there merely “was one story on the homepage of The Daily Caller, a conservative news website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, but it was buried under a slew of other stories.”
Except such an accusation isn’t supported by reality.
As The Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll pointed out, the story “STORMY SUES TRUMP” was prominently featured on the site’s homepage for over 12 hours.
Last: And to top it off, a couple folks who work on digital reportage don’t know how to use wayback.
Here’s our front page Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, which means the story was touted in top real estate on our site for roughly more than 12 hours. pic.twitter.com/H6X5pEEYEU
— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) March 8, 2018
No reasonable person who actually bothered to check the site could come to the conclusion that it was “buried” under other articles.
Moreover, even if Darcy’s assertion was true, it doesn’t appear that the site’s readers had any difficulty accessing the coverage. David Brooks, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s deputy editor, showed that a separate Daniels story was among the current the most popular articles on the site.
Here is a current view of the most popular articles on our site. What are you even talking about? pic.twitter.com/Ymv4TFRN9I
— Dave Brooks (@Dave_M_Brooks) March 8, 2018
If readers want to find more stories on the scandal, they can just click one of the tags at the bottom of the article and read one of the dozen-plus stories on the alleged affair — hardly the work of some evil right-wing organization dedicated to misleading its audience.
Such dishonesty wasn’t even the most pathetic part of CNN’s so-called reporting. Darcy, with the help of ex-Politico journalist Hadas Gold, claimed TheDC didn’t “immediately respond to requests for comment.”
Of course, you wouldn’t find that now. After Ingersoll pointed out that he did in fact respond to their request — and had even spoken to Gold minutes before their article went up — CNN removed the line, without any sort of edit note or official update.
I asked both Darcy and his editor via Twitter if such a practice was common (it’s not). They didn’t respond.
Translation: CNN thinks their readers are too stupid to notice substantial corrections — or perhaps they’re not worthy of them.
Scrutiny of the press is a necessary and worthy job. I’m confident there are actual real journalistic scandals or episodes of misconduct that CNN could be directing its vast resources into investigating. Perhaps they could start internally.
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