The Daily Caller

Overview

The Daily Caller is a conservative news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C., founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel with a $3 million commitment from Republican donor Foster Friess (InsideHook). The standard telling of the site — a right-wing answer to the Huffington Post that Carlson walked away from in 2020 — misses the two things that make it genuinely unusual. First, it wholly owns a fact-checking operation, CheckYourFact, that Facebook itself admitted to its U.S. third-party fact-checking program, giving a conservative outlet the platform-level power to label content “false” and demote it in News Feed (Science). Second, it holds a seat in the White House press-pool rotation, filing the same pool dispatches as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (news9.com; The Daily Caller).

The fact-checking arm Facebook used

Check Your Fact is wholly owned by The Daily Caller. According to the company, it is editorially independent with its own staff and receives funding from both The Daily Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation (Science). In 2019, Facebook announced a partnership with CheckYourFact.com to provide third-party oversight of news on its platform. Check Your Fact became one of just six organizations Facebook listed as fact-checkers in the United States — the others including the Associated Press and PolitiFact — all of which had passed an assessment by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (Science).

The power that came with the listing was real: “If a fact-checker rates content as false, it will appear lower in News Feed,” Facebook’s fact-checking page stated, a demotion that “significantly reduces the number of people who see it” (Science). The partnership had a political backstory: Facebook vice president Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House aide, had pushed for about a year for the company to partner with The Daily Caller, the Wall Street Journal reported, amid complaints by some conservatives that Facebook was biased against them (Science).

The arrangement drew sharp criticism. Climate scientists worried that climate articles would be downplayed; Susan Joy Hassol, a science-outreach nonprofit director, accused the site of “partial truth telling that isn’t technically wrong but doesn’t give the full picture,” and climate scientist Michael Mann called the partnership “truly disturbing” (Science). Check Your Fact’s editor, David Sivak, answered back: “We don’t have an editorial stance on climate change, or any other topic for that matter. We’re fact checkers, and we take our credibility seriously… We’re fair and always give the reader a complete picture” (Science).

The fiercest flashpoint came in early 2020, when Check Your Fact rated “false” a Politico story headlined “Trump rallies his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax’” and a similar NBC News story. The fact-check argued Trump had described Democratic criticism of his handling of the virus — not the virus itself — as the “hoax”; critics countered that the ruling resolved the ambiguity in Trump’s favor (TheWrap). This profile does not rule on who was right; it records that a conservative outlet’s fact-checking arm briefly held platform-grade editorial power over its rivals’ stories — a status no general profile of the site mentions.

In the White House press pool

Whatever its editorial reputation, The Daily Caller holds working-press credentials at the highest level. A September 2026 explainer on the White House press pool names the print pool as including “over 30 outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail and the Daily Caller,” whose reporters compile dispatches into emails shared with White House Correspondents’ Association members and passed along by the White House press office (news9.com).

That access sits inside a changed system. For years the Correspondents’ Association chose pool participants; in February 2025 the White House press office took over the selection, and since then “several smaller, right-leaning organizations have begun participating” (news9.com). The Caller’s own about page describes the infrastructure behind its seat: reporters credentialed in the U.S. Senate and House press galleries, a dedicated White House correspondent, WHCA membership, and membership in the White House in-town press pool, “responsible for dispatching reports to the global press at White House events on a monthly basis” (The Daily Caller). It also notes an earlier credential: in 2016 the site was “included as a full-time member of the traveling press pool for the Democratic nominee” (The Daily Caller).

Founding: two roommates and $3 million

Carlson and Patel were roommates at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, before their careers diverged — Carlson into conservative commentary, Patel into Republican politics as a longtime deputy to Lewis “Scooter” Libby and later chief policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney (InsideHook; Science). In 2010 they began publishing The Daily Caller as a right-wing alternative to the Huffington Post, backed by Foster Friess’s $3 million commitment (InsideHook). Patel ran the business side while Carlson served as editor-in-chief, and Carlson later credited the site’s survival to his partner: “The only reason the Daily Caller still exists is because the guy running it is one of the very rare conservative intellectuals who understands business… he keeps costs in line with revenue” (InsideHook). By 2020 the operation had grown to a staff of about 80 employees (InsideHook).

The site describes itself as “one of America’s largest and fastest-growing news publications,” with a team of full-time reporters and editors producing original reporting, investigations, entertainment, commentary and breaking news, and claims over 20 million unique readers a month alongside distribution partnerships with Yahoo and MSN and a Facebook managed partnership (The Daily Caller). Those reach figures are the site’s own claims, not independently verified numbers.

2012: the heckle that made it famous

The Daily Caller’s national breakout came not from a scoop but from a breach of decorum. During President Barack Obama’s Rose Garden announcement of the deferred-action immigration policy, Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro shouted, “Why’d you favor foreigners over Americans?” — on live television (TheWrap). Obama shot back, “Excuse me, sir, but it’s not time for questions”; Munro pressed, “Are you going to take questions?”; Obama: “Not while I’m speaking” (TheWrap). After the speech, Obama returned to the question anyway: “The answer to your question, sir — and next time I’d prefer that you let me finish my statements before you ask that question — is this is the right thing to do for the American people.” When Munro tried to respond, Obama cut him off: “I didn’t ask for an argument. I’m answering your question” (TheWrap). The exchange — an extreme breach of press etiquette, broadcast live — fixed the young site’s identity in the public mind as the outlet willing to shout at a president.

2020: Carlson exits, Patel takes control

In June 2020, Carlson left The Daily Caller to concentrate on his Fox News program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” telling the Wall Street Journal, “I’m just too absorbed in what I’m doing… I wasn’t helping in any way, because I’ve got an hour to do every night” (MediaPost). Patel bought out Carlson’s roughly one-third stake and took a controlling interest; Foster Friess remained the only other main investor (MediaPost; InsideHook). Patel told the Journal the buyout made The Daily Caller “the largest digital media company owned by a person of color” — Patel is of Indian ethnicity (MediaPost). Carlson had already stepped back editorially in 2016, when he gave up the editor-in-chief role to start the Fox show; Fox News had viewed his involvement with the site as a conflict of interest with its own competing website (MediaPost; InsideHook). At the time of the split, the site was drawing nearly 5 million monthly unique visitors, up 3% year over year on Comscore data (MediaPost).

What this profile does not claim

This profile states the founding year as 2010; the widely listed exact launch date of January 11, 2010 did not appear in a fully-read source and is not asserted. It does not give a current traffic figure — the roughly 5 million monthly uniques number dates to April 2020, and the 20 million figure is the site’s own claim. It does not name a current editor-in-chief, which no fully-read source verified. It presents the dispute over CheckYourFact’s climate and coronavirus rulings as competing claims from named parties, not as a settled verdict. And it makes no claim about the site’s trustworthiness relative to other outlets — polling-based characterizations seen in some coverage were not verified for this profile.