The fastest way to assure a news article avoids getting scrutinized by fact-checking organizations is for it to go after The Daily Wire or its founder, Ben Shapiro.
The Washington Post proved that truth on Thursday, when it falsely described Shapiro as a “vaccine skeptic” and branded The Daily Wire one of the internet’s most “prominent sources of anti-vaccine information.” The newspaper cited a report from the German Marshall Fund, which found that The Daily Wire’s social media posts “about vaccine mandates in particular drew significantly more engagement than their typical” posts.
The article did not specify any particular story on The Daily Wire as evidence of “anti-vaccine information” — although it quoted “an Obama administration alum” who accused this website of making “false or misleading claims.” It apparently targeted Daily Wire articles quoting those opposed to COVID-19 vaccination mandates. Shapiro has said he has taken the vaccine, but The Daily Wire led a successful lawsuit against a Biden administration proposal that would have compelled businesses that employ 100 or more people to require them to get vaccinated or face the possibility of being fired.
The self-appointed media fact-checkers have regularly taken a tendentious approach to Daily Wire material, while turning a blind eye to open fabrications from the legacy media.
These statements tend to cluster around successful undertakings by this website and its principals. For instance in 2019, on the day after Ben Shapiro’s book “The Right Side of History” reached number one on the New York Times’ bestseller list, The Economist ran an article calling Shapiro a “pop idol of the alt-right.” Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, has frequently criticized the “Alt-Right” — a term coined and popularized by raging anti-Semite Richard Spencer. Rather than correct the matter, the Boston Globe called The Daily Wire an “Alt-Right outpost” a few months later.
The attacks resumed last July, when NPR attacked The Daily Wire (at your expense) without citing any false statement in our reporting. The taxpayer-funded news outlet instead quoted Jaime Settle of the College of William & Mary saying that The Daily Wire’s stories “tend to not provide very much context for the information that they are providing. If you’ve stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation.” In other words, The Daily Wire’s coverage is different; it comes without left-wing editorializing and Woke “context” posing as reporting.
As a result, The Daily Wire has been labeled as a source of misinformation even though we got the facts right. For instance:
Snopes denounced a Daily Wire article titled “Report: AOC Was Not Inside Capitol Building During Breach” on January 6 as “Mostly False.” The reason? While “Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located,” nonetheless “Ocasio-Cortez never claimed to be in the main Capitol building.”
Then again, The Daily Wire’s story never claimed Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be in the main Capitol building. By Snopes’ logic, its “Mostly False” rating is mostly false.
“This is a weird fact-check from Snopes,” wrote Ben Shapiro last February. “I mean, they say that ‘what’s true’ is EXACTLY what the DW tweet says. Then they call the DW tweet ‘misleading.’ Almost as though they’re just a Left-wing spin outfit.”
This is a weird fact-check from Snopes. I mean, they say that "what's true" is EXACTLY what the DW tweet says. Then they call the DW tweet "misleading." Almost as though they're just a Left-wing spin outfit. pic.twitter.com/IvkD8wiguz
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 4, 2021
Snopes made its political calculations clear. It lumped The Daily Wire in with an alleged “right-wing disinformation machine” that engaged in “a circus of cyberbullying.”
A few days later, Snopes rated a Daily Wire story about the Loudoun County (Virginia) Public Schools decision to cancel Dr. Seuss as “Mostly False” because “Dr. Seuss’ books have not been banned by the school system or limited in any way; they remain available to the students in libraries and classrooms.” Once again, The Daily Wire’s story did not say the school district had pulled the books from its libraries; it accurately reported that the school system would not recognize the beloved children’s author during “Read Across America Day.”
At the same time, media fact-checkers let legacy media outlets spin and mislead with impunity. For example, CNN medical expert and former president of Planned Parenthood, Dr. Leana Wen, claimed that she had changed her position on mask mandates, because “the science has changed.”
We know that vaccines protect very well against Omicron, which is the dominant variant. Everyone five and older have [sic] widespread access to vaccines. And we also know about one-way masking — the idea that, even if other people around you aren’t wearing masks, if you wear a high-quality mask, that also protects you, the wearer, too.
Yet the science had not changed on any of those issues since Wen advised the Biden administration to implement COVID-19 vaccination passports.
Sometimes it is the fact-checkers themselves who spin misinformation. Last May, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler claimed that “the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible.” But the “new” information he cited had been known for months.
Curiously, the most recent attacks against The Daily Wire mention — or coincide with — The Daily Wire’s successes. NPR noted that in 2021, “The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.” The Washington Post also noted this website’s stories “drew more interactions — likes, comments and shares — than the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and NPR combined.” The NPR story came near the time this website released its “Morning Wire” podcast, while The Washington Post story comes shortly after the highly successful debut of The Daily Wire’s first entertainment offering, “Shut In.”
Whatever the reason for the prevalence of exacting or erroneous fact-checks against The Daily Wire, facts have nothing to do with it.