CNN's Daniel Dale Sounds the Final Death Knell for Fact-Checking

CNN’s Daniel Dale is among the absolute worst when it comes to politically biased fact-checking.

For instance, Dale has thoroughly beclowned himself with ridiculously one-sided “fact checks” like claiming during one presidential debate last year that Biden “was again imperfect from a fact check perspective” while “Trump was, as usual, a serial liar.”

In another example, during a CNN town hall for Biden last September Dale actually praised Biden for “implicitly fact-checking Trump by…uttering many consecutive coherent sentences” (yes, he really said that).

While Biden is far from the only Democrat for who Dale acts as a full-fledged apologist, he is the one for who Dale most frequently makes excuses.

With all of that in mind, it seems only fitting that he sounded the final death knell for the fact-checking industry with his latest “fact check” of Biden. Check out how Dale framed his piece reviewing Biden’s first 100 days in office:

This president says some inaccurate stuff. Not ideal. But there’s no pretending that this era is remotely similar to the last president’s staggering daily avalanche of extreme wrongness.

My fact-check look at Biden’s first 100 days: https://t.co/BTLAd7bD4N

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 2, 2021

Dale was quite proud of what he wrote and promoted it numerous times on his Twitter account, but that one got the most attention because of how he characterized Biden’s lies as “inaccurate stuff” rather than, well, lies.

In fact, if you read the piece itself, Dale doesn’t use the word “lie” in it once, although “lacking context” was mentioned once,” “misleading” was used twice, with “inaccurate” getting three mentions. The operative term to describe Biden’s lies was “false claims.”

The inability/unwillingness of Dale to call Biden out using the word “lie” was more than apparent back in January when he characterized a lie-riddled speech Biden made about the COVID “relief” plan as “quite factual.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist nor a CNN “expert” to be able to understand that if fact-checking has now devolved into calling a Democrat’s lies mere “inaccurate stuff” while characterizing Republican lies (some of which in reality weren’t) quite differently, then the fact-checking industry is well and truly officially dead.

I should note, too, that Dale’s garbage “100 days” analysis comes just a few days after Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler announced that the paper’s database for “false Biden claims” would not extend beyond 100 days, though he maintained that they would still fact check statements Biden made:

Here's the Biden database — which we do not plan to extend beyond 100 days. I have learned my lesson. https://t.co/qK42PRlnrS

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) April 27, 2021

As I’ve said before, we can laugh a bit at all of this but in reality, it’s really sad, because the public should be able to look to fact-checkers to check claims and rate them without doing so based on political biases. But they can’t, because fact-checkers have been reduced to shilling for one major political party over the other because narratives – even when inarguably false – are more important than calling it down the line.

It won’t get any better, unfortunately, because their left-leaning audiences are okay with living in that alternative reality, where everything their guy says is “lacking context,” “nuanced,” or simply “inaccurate” while everything the other guy says is a blatant lie and part of some evil plot to con the public.

As is the case for the MSM, respect for fact-checkers at this point is at an all-time low. Who can they blame? They’ll try to blame Trump, of course, but the reality is they have no one to blame but themselves.