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Daily Caller Resumes Trump-Era Role As GOP Press Release Distributor [1]

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Date: 2023-05-08

We give The Daily Caller a lot of grief for its many years of climate disinformation , its favorable coverage of donors , like the Kochs , and the fact that it’s allegedly a charity scam , but there's also the fact that the outlet is basically a press release distributor for the Republican party.

In some ways, that's a return to the Trump era, when The Daily Caller was defending used Trump mattress weirdo Scott Pruitt and his polluter-driven EPA moves to censor science , while also attacking one of President Obama's EPA administrators for using an unofficial email- while defending Pruitt as he was using four, so many that even his own aids didn't recognize them all.

But what caught our eye lately was a string of Daily Caller stories with "EXCLUSIVE" headlines on stories about Republican virtue signaling with moves that will go nowhere and are meant solely to generate headlines from compliant "news" outlets like the Caller.

The first piece was premised on a Republican in the US House of Representatives introducing a bill to " eliminate the Federal Insurance Office ," which the Caller spiced up with the following headline: "EXCLUSIVE: House Republicans Move To Eliminate Regulatory Office Pushing ‘Green New Deal’ Climate Policy."

The Federal Insurance Office (FIO) was set up during the Obama administration, and Republicans want it gone because last year they announced that the FIO would start to assess how climate risks might impact insurance plans.

Since the Democratic party controls the Senate and White House, this bill is going nowhere. It has zero actual legislative potential. But because a House member sent a PDF of the show bill to The Daily Caller, all of a sudden it's an important EXCLUSIVE, as though the introduction of a bill with zero potential to become law has any news value beyond the propaganda purposes for which it was written.

The next day, the same thing happened. House Republicans introduced a bill that will never become a law, and Daily Caller Congressional Correspondent Michael Ginsberg ran an " EXCLUSIVE " about the bill that would "cut off funding for schools that ban carbon energy advertising."

Students at the University of Washington exercised their free speech rights and protested fossil fuel companies at a jobs fair, and Republicans rushed into action with a bill that will never go any further than the Daily Caller's EXCLUSIVE.

Apparently, these days Republicans have nothing better to do than insert Big Government into school job fairs and insist that their financial backers in the fossil fuel industry be invited to recruit students into an industry that is destroying their present and promises to profit as much as possible off of destroying their future.

But it's not just elected Republicans that the Caller uncritically echoes! Remember , they also lavish fawning coverage on anyone who donates to them, which makes us wonder if they're getting some funding from the group behind the third " EXCLUSIVE: Watchdog Group Sues EPA For Records Of Frank Biden’s Potential Communication With The Agency ."

While most real news outlets might wait to report on the outcome of an investigation, for The Daily Caller, just the question is enough, so long as the implication is bad for the Democratic party. Did President Biden's brother Frank act unethically? There's no evidence, but the "Functional Government Initiative" has questions, and that's good enough for the Daily Caller!

The Caller's covered FGI announcements of lawsuits and record requests another seven times over the past year- though never any "news" about the results of those investigations, because that would require actual wrongdoing, and not just disinformation-generating accusations.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/8/2168120/-Daily-Caller-Resumes-Trump-Era-Role-As-GOP-Press-Release-Distributor

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