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Daily Caller's Loch Ness Nonsense Shows Outlet Is Happy To Be Stupid For Clicks [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-20  

It's been some 31 years since the Weekly World News announced the existence of "Bat Boy," an obviously not real, perpetually 10-year-old hybrid of bat and human. In the decades since, Bat Boy has become, at least to us, emblematic of the far-fetched but fun claims found in supermarket tabloids where readers are expecting entertainment, not journalism.

Which brings us to today's subject, the Daily Caller. Long posing as news, but publishing mostly Republican propaganda that serves its donors interests , the Daily Caller is increasingly following Michael Shellenberger's UFOs-for-clicks strategy , sacrificing the pretense of journalistic integrity for the sake of clicks from people looking for some stupid entertainment.

This past summer we laughed at their defense of an unhinged conspiracy theory, but now they're apparently leaning into the nonsense directly.

"Is This Nessie?" asked a recent headline claiming that a "video possibly shows [the] legendary Loch Ness monster." Apparently, the monster made an appearance during an Alzheimer's Society canoe challenge, which in and of itself could be the set-up to an insensitive joke about the mental faculties of people who read the Daily Caller and believe in monsters.

"Oh man," wrote the Caller's sports and entertainment blogger Andrew Powell, "this could honestly go either way."

Well it could maybe go either way, but only one of those ways is honest.

"The shape in the water looks exactly how Nessie has been portrayed over the years," Powell writes, as though the portrayals over the years haven't also just been sticks in the water that our human minds shape into a serpent because brains are programmed to make meaning out of random chaos.

And to his credit, he notes that he does "also understand the argument of 'it looks like sand moving with the water' or just the plain ol' 'it looks like water moving.'" "Yeah, I get it,” Powell writes. “Not only does it give off the visual of that, but as much as it disappoints me to say, there's just not much evidence whatsoever the Loch Ness Monster exists."

Even "not much" is an incredible overstatement, since zero evidence exists. "But whether you believe this is Nessie or not," Powell continues, "you have to be intrigued by the fact that there's a shape in the water that looks exactly like what I like to view as my sea creature homie — such a cool beast, if true. And hopefully that ends up being the case… LONG LIVE NESSIE!"

Clearly, Powell's not reporting that Nessie has actually been found and is instead just trying to get some clicks on an obvious Bat Boy situation. Unfortunately, that totally makes sense, because the Daily Caller, despite being a Facebook-approved fact checking outlet considered actual media by far too many, is in reality little more than a right-wing version of the Weekly World News and other tabloids trafficking in conspiracies and hoaxes for the sake of making a buck from readers looking for a chuckle.

But given that the Daily Caller's been caught giving donors preferable treatment , the real question is: are they getting funding from Big Nessie for this pro-cryptid content?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/20/2200561/-Daily-Caller-s-Loch-Ness-Nonsense-Shows-Outlet-Is-Happy-To-Be-Stupid-For-Clicks?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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