Claim: "You better believe if you're a person in power, expert fact-checker Daniel Dale is watching your words."
Who said it:
CNN's Don Lemon, who hosts a morning show at the embattled network after losing his late-night gig due to low ratings. He was introducing Dale for a segment on the "misleading" and "just plain wrong" claims made by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) over the past several weeks.
Why it matters:
Mainstream journalists are obsessed with so-called experts and tend to view public skepticism of these so-called experts as an existential threat to democracy. Perhaps the American public is right to be skeptical. As far as the Washington Free Beacon is concerned, simply labeling someone an "expert fact-checker" does not make it so. They deserve to be fact-checked as thoroughly as everyone else.
Context:
We're just glad to know that Dale is alive. As noted in a previous Free Beacon fact check, Dale has been missing in action since mid-December, and it wasn't the first time this has happened during the Biden administration.
Analysis:
According to Dale's bio on Twitter, where he hasn't posted since Dec. 19, his duties as a so-called expert fact-checker include "fact-checking the president, 2024 candidates, [and] others."
It's true that Dale occasionally fact-checks President Joe Biden, who is not only the most powerful person on the planet but also a cognitively impaired octogenarian with a long history of lying about everything. One would think that Biden would be a frequent subject of Dale's so-called analysis. Alas, this is not the case.
Dale hasn't fact-checked Biden since Nov. 5. It's not as if Biden has stopped lying. For example, last month he claimed that when he was elected vice president (in 2008), his father urged him to give his ailing Uncle Frank a Purple Heart for his service in World War II. Biden's uncle died in 1999; his father passed in 2002. The White House didn't even try to defend or explain the fake story.
During that time, Dale has published seven fact-checks involving claims by Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, and other Republican politicians—zero involving Democrats, who control the White House and the U.S. Senate. It would appear that if you're a "person in power" who belongs to the Democratic Party, there's a good chance that CNN's "expert fact-checker" is not devoting a significant amount of time, if any, to "watching your words" and analyzing their accuracy.
