WHOOPS! Daily Caller Deletes Story About Founder Tucker Carlson Voting for Kanye West
Like most good news sites, the editors at The Daily Caller saw a Politico report that Tucker Carlson is telling people he voted for Kanye West in 2020 and presumably thought, “that’s a unique story, let’s get something up!”
Unlike good news sites, however, the editors curiously decided to delete both the story and their tweet reporting it, with nary an explanation as to why. Perhaps Carlson’s role as founder of the Daily Caller had something to do with that decision?
Politico Playbook breathlessly reported:
Speaking of that, previously pro-Trump TUCKER CARLSON has confided to associates that he quietly voted for KANYE WEST for president in 2020, per Daniel Lippman, and previously anti-Trump J.D. VANCE, now officially a Senate candidate from Ohio, quietly erased his old tweets attacking Trump, including one calling him “reprehensible,” per CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski.
And speaking of deleting postings, The Daily Caller, which Carlson co-founded a decade ago before leaving last year, erased a tweet Thursday linking to its own story on Lippman’s report. We couldn’t find the story on its homepage, either.
The Daily Caller refers to its staff as “the journalists who love America” but the deletion of an entire without any explanation is not really considered an accepted standard practice of journalism.
Critical thinkers are left with two likely explanations of why this story completely disappeared from the Daily Caller website.
First, the Caller found out that Lippman’s reporting on Carlson’s comments about a Kanye vote was completely wrong, and therefore, spiked the aggregated report. But if that were the case, complete deletion of the post wouldn’t make much sense. We’d see an update or a follow-up story condemning the media for bad reporting, right? So far, no such story can be found on the Daily Caller website.
The other possibility, which is more likely, is that the co-founder of the Daily Caller, and the subject of the story itself, did not like that this story was out there, and politely used his influence and connections to the site to take it down. We don’t know if this is the case, but it wouldn’t surprise us in the least if it turned out to be true.
Carlson, we should note, sold his stake in the Daily Caller last year to focus full-time on his Fox News show.
He is now the highest-rated cable news host in the land, in part due to the nearly daily controversies he curries with the remarkably deft threading of his populist commentary through the needle of forbidden topics and commentary.
Carlson regularly paints himself as an advocate against media conspiracists who are rigging the game against his viewers. That concept would be greatly undermined, however, if he had the sort of power to simply spike a story at a very influential conservative media outlet like The Daily Caller, which, again, he founded.
We have reached out to the Daily Caller for an explanation regarding the disappearing post.
UPDATE: Daily Caller Editor Geoffry Ingersoll explained the deleted story in an exclusive to Mediaite, saying “We published it too early. We’re working on a bigger piece about how he hand wrote in every Kardashian for the school board.”
We eagerly anticipate the dive into Tucker Carlson’s ironically detached ballot. Or, Ingersoll is deflecting from Daily Caller’s shoddy journalism by taking the piss. Either way, Happy Fourth of July!
