CNN’s Daniel Dale Scoffs at Claims He’s Been ‘Silenced’ as ‘Real Silly!’

Screenshot via CNN.

CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale reassured his followers that he was not being “silenced” by the network and scoffed at claims he was being kept off the air as “real silly.”

President Donald Trump has heavily contributed to Dale’s workload as his second term has progressed, as CNN’s resident fact checker has tackled the numerous misrepresentations, errors, and flat-out “lies” the president has woven into his speeches and social media posts. Many of Trump’s inaccurate statements have been previously debunked but he has continued to recycle them, with the occasional new falsehoods added in.

Sometimes Dale’s fact checks come in tweets, sometimes in articles on CNN’s website, sometimes on-air, and oftentimes combinations of those. Earlier this summer, viewers noticed that Dale had not been on television for a few months, but CNN sharply denied any suggestion that he was being sidelined amid merger discussions between Paramount Skydance and CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, or to otherwise placate Trump.

Dale was back in front of CNN’s cameras in mid-June, shredding Trump as a “seasoned veteran conspiracy theorist” who was deploying his “same playbook” to make “total nonsense” claims.

This week, September 11th commemorative events and GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas provided a plethora of content for Dale to dissect, including reviving his old unverified claims about helping at Ground Zero, new claims about being carried away by two firemen who “lifted me up and started running with me,” and repeating false attacks by the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina against his Democratic opponent.

Dale tackled the “[m]any, many false claims” and “long-debunked lies” from Trump’s convention speech on air, in multiple tweets, and in an article he had to update.

Dale followed up Thursday morning with more “quick fact checks” — in a tweet that was more than 800 words and linked to an article on CNN’s website.

One of Dale’s followers replied to one of his tweets with a comment saying it was “an absolute absurdity that CNN no longer allows you to do this on air.”

“This stuff is real silly!” Dale retorted. “CNN has me doing on-air fact checks all the time…including three hits so far today, live on screen in text form as Trump spoke last night, and multiple times earlier in the week.”

Dale added an explanation for his absence over the summer and emphasized that “all is well”:

I wasn’t on TV for a stretch earlier this year partly because I took some time off and mostly because our shows were stuffed with excellent Iran coverage and other news. We told outlets writing “has he been silenced???” stories that the angle was baseless – which should have been clear given that CNN continued to highlight my articles on our quite popular website – and that limited TV time goes in cycles for lots of us.

In conclusion: all is well and completely normal over here.

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