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11 January 2010

Tucker Carlson’s new toy

Will the Daily Caller be the HuffPo of the right?

By Sophie Elmhirst

Marching into the online magazine world today comes the Daily Caller, a new website from Tucker Carlson, former TV personality for CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. It has, like any serious political media outlet should, a picture of a group of scantily clad women on its front page today. Excellent.

Tucker, once famous for wearing a jaunty bow tie — that graceful accessory of many a right-wing pundit — claims the following for his creation:

This is primarily a news site. We see our core job as straightforward: Find out what’s happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply.

So, we can expect an unbiased, non-partisan guide through the complexities of US politics? Only if you ignore long comment pieces like this from Tom Price, member of Congress and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, entitled How the GOP gets its mojo back and extolling the “energy, enthusiasm and commitment” of the Tea Party movement. Oh, and this from Andrew Breitbart:

The launch of the Daily Caller is a necessary step toward creating ideological parity in the all-too-clearly biased mainstream media. It is a good thing that you, Tucker, are admitting that you come to the table with certain ideological baggage, and my new site Big Journalism will be there to watch your back when the well-funded, organized left’s knives come out to try to discredit and attempt to destroy you. Believe me, they will.

Some might argue that bringing up the ideological baggage on day one rather blows the straight news sell out of the water. But still, let’s give the DC a chance.

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On the name — it’s subtly there to remind us of where it lives, deep in the hub of Washington, tapped into all that news. Although, as one commenter put it on HuffPo: “Of all the possible combinations that would result in the desired “The DC”, was the Daily Caller the best he could come up with?”

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