CNN’s resident fact-checker, who routinely refutes false claims pushed by Donald Trump, has not appeared on air for three months.
Analysis from Status found that Daniel Dale has not appeared on the television network since mid-March, when he took part in a brief segment about AI and the Iran war. He has not appeared on CNN to fact-check the 79-year-old president since late February.
Dale’s disappearance from the airwaves has raised some eyebrows, given that it coincided with Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, putting the network under the control of media mogul David Ellison, the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison.
Just two days before the deal was finalized, Dale appeared on CNN to disprove claims Trump made during his record-breaking 1-hour, 48-minute State of the Union address in February.
Dale is still writing for CNN’s website, with his latest article appearing on Tuesday to fact-check Trump’s claim that U.S. gas prices during his war with Iran are lower than they were during the spike that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine under Joe Biden.
Dale, who moved to Toronto last year, also still records short-form video content for CNN, including an Instagram post fact-checking Trump’s insistence that he never made a 2024 campaign vow not to start a new war during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.
A spokesperson for CNN denied suggestions that Dale has effectively been sidelined from appearing on air because of the merger, which has put CNN under the same corporate umbrella as the now Trump-friendly CBS News.
“There is no truth to this,” a CNN spokesperson told Status. “Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact-checks of the president are an important part of CNN’s political coverage.
“Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day—any suggestion otherwise is false.”
Journalist Tommy Christopher, who first noted Dale’s disappearance from CNN in late May, downplayed the suggestion that Dale has simply been appearing less because Trump has not delivered a major speech warranting his presence.
“Unfortunately, Trump giving a speech has never been a predicate for Daniel Dale to do a fact-check, since Trump finds opportunities to lie dozens of times every day. Just check, I don’t know, the Daniel Dale page on CNN,” Christopher wrote on his Substack on May 25.
“I won’t speculate, but what I will say is that in the context of Trump punishing his enemies with everything from cancellation to threats of imprisonment, and media outlets capitulating to Trump and paying out tens of millions of dollars in de facto bribes, a person could be forgiven for thinking that Dale’s reporting is being buried so as not to displease Trump or his allies.”
The Daily Beast has contacted CNN for comment.
