At a time when his network remains under assault by the administration, CNN’s top fact-checker Daniel Dale received acclaim as he revealed his top takeaways after a full decade of covering and correcting President Donald Trump.
On Sunday morning, Dale published a new piece marking the notable anniversary, digging into the things he has learned over the years of sifting through Trump’s “remarkable number of lies” during his time at the forefront of American political life.
“Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was telling a remarkable number of lies but was rarely being corrected. Like a lot of people, I thought Trump would lose the 2016 election,” Dale detailed. “I was very wrong. And Trump continued to be very wrong, about a dizzying variety of subjects, for the next decade.”
He added later in the piece: “The lies cause real harm. Some of Trump’s lies are so bizarre or trivial that I can’t help but laugh. On the whole, though, his lies have been deeply harmful to the country. People died because of the Capitol riot prompted by his lies about the 2020 election. His lies downplaying Covid-19 almost certainly led to deaths, too. Specific people targeted by his lies, including journalists, judges and election workers, have faced threats and harassment. His lies have worsened innumerable public debates around critical policy issues. And American democracy itself is worse off for all the lying, too.”
The reaction to the piece across social media was largely glowing, with various colleagues and public figures hailing Dale’s efforts and highlighting the particularly important points raised in his new piece.
“Thank you, Daniel Dale, for being one of the few political reporters who is willing to describe Trump’s *unmatched* degree of dishonesty and lying more accurately and consistently,” communications consultant Susan Bordson wrote in response to the piece on X, highlighting further a “Key excerpt re MSM press practices” in response to Trump’s lies.
“Pro-Trump media entities have shown embarrassingly little interest in addressing his lies,” Dale wrote in the passage she highlighted. “But more neutral outlets have regularly failed, too. On the last full day of Trump’s first presidency in 2021, I wrote, ‘Too often, coverage of flagrantly dishonest Trump speeches still mentioned the dishonesty in passing or not at all. Too often, coverage still quoted the president’s lies without explaining that they were wrong.’ More than five years later, these problems persist.”
Brian Stelter, a professional colleague of Dale’s and chief media analyst for CNN, highlighted some of what he saw as the key takeaways from the piece: “Dale’s takeaways include: ‘the bigger the crisis, the more Trump lies,’ Trump ‘is not only a supplier of bad information but a consumer of it,’ ‘the mainstream media doesn’t handle Trump’s lying well enough,’ and ‘the lies cause real harm.'”
“That our nation has largely adjusted to having a habitual liar as president is shameful,” Jennifer Erin Valent wrote. “Worse yet, he has been strongly supported by Christians who claim to honor the God of truth, who are meant to defy the father of lies, and who are commanded not to bear false witness.”
“Everybody who supports or opposes Trump should read this, the thoughts of prominent factchecker Daniel Dale on the context and proliferation of Trump’s lies,” retired Chicago reporter Ray Long wrote.
“One of the heroes of American journalism is this Canadian, who has single-handedly researched and catalogued thousands of lies by our president,” Daniel Boardman, dean of the Klein College of Media and Communications, wrote in a post about Dale.
“‘Two months before Election Day in 2020… he was telling so many campaign lies that I’d become physically unable to look into all of them while living something loosely resembling a healthy life,'” senior CNN producer Shawn Reynolds wrote in a post quoting Dale’s piece. “By then, I’d recorded more than 8,500 false claims since September 2016.”