[22] In a 2010 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Carlson described The Daily Caller's prospective audience as "[p]eople who are distrustful of conventional news organizations".

[26] Patel brought in Omeed Malik as a new partner; a former hedge fund managing director and Muslim American Democrat, he was a donor to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

[30] During a January 2010 interview with Politico, Carlson said The Daily Caller was not going to be tied to his personal political ideologies and that he wanted it to be "breaking stories of importance".

[31] In a Washington Post article about The Daily Caller's launch, Howard Kurtz wrote, "[Carlson's] partner is Neil Patel, a former Dick Cheney aide.

[24] In a 2012 Washingtonian article, Tom Bartlett said Carlson and Patel developed The Daily Caller as "a conservative news site in the mold of the liberal Huffington Post but with more firearms coverage and fewer nipple-slip slide shows".

[33] In 2019, the Columbia Journalism Review described The Daily Caller as "right wing",[34] a description also used by Business Insider,[35] Snopes,[36] and Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

[39] A 2021 Politico article described The Daily Caller as "mainstream right", as opposed to more "conspiratorial fringe" outlets such as One America News Network.

[41] The accuracy of certain articles published in the early-to-mid 2010s was particularly questioned, as with a 2011 article claiming that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was on a path towards spending $21 billion per year to hire 230,000 staff to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; at the time, the EPA had 17,000 staff and a total budget of $8.7 billion, while the numbers reported by The Daily Caller reflected the numbers that, according to Politifact and a legal brief filed in a related case, the agency in question would be obligated to hire "to regulate greenhouse gasses from all sources that emit them above the level set in statute".

[3]: 14  According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, The Daily Caller "descended into extremism and sensationalism, publishing unsupported and frequently vulgar attacks on Democratic leaders, false criticisms of liberal causes, and popular conspiracy theories.

[55] In 2011, The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to disseminate a Project Veritas video by conservative provocateur James O'Keefe which purportedly showed an NPR fundraiser deriding Republicans.

[61] In November 2012, The Daily Caller posted interviews with two women claiming that New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez had paid them for sex while he was a guest of a campaign donor.

The website denied this allegation, stating: "At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation".

In March 2015, The Daily Caller columnist Mickey Kaus quit after editor Tucker Carlson refused to run a column critical of Fox News coverage of the immigration policy debate.

[81] The video clip drew attention in August 2017 after a white supremacist murdered one counter-protester and injured 35 more by intentionally driving a car into them at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

[81][84] In 2018, The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to report on Stefan Halper, a confidential FBI source, and his interactions with Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

[87][88][89] In 2020, during The Daily Caller''s coverage of protests in Louisville, Kentucky related to the shooting of Breonna Taylor and subsequent verdict on the police involved, two of their reporters were arrested and held overnight.

[90][91] According to a study by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, The Daily Caller was among the most popular right-wing news sites during the 2016 United States presidential election.

The study found that The Daily Caller provided "amplification and legitimation" for "the most extreme conspiracy sites", such as Truthfeed, InfoWars, The Gateway Pundit and Conservative Treehouse.

[92][93][94] The Daily Caller also "employed anti-immigrant narratives that echoed sentiments from the alt-right and white nationalists but without the explicitly racist and pro-segregation language".

[93] The Daily Caller also made the "utterly unsubstantiated and unsourced claim" that Hillary Clinton instructed Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson "to try to shut down Mosaic Fertilizer, described as America's largest phosphate mining company, in exchange for a $15 million donation to the Clinton Foundation from King Mohammed VI of Morocco, ostensibly to benefit Morocco's state-owned phosphate company".

[93] According to Callum Borchers of The Washington Post, The Daily Caller has "a peculiar business structure that enables it to increase revenue while reducing its tax obligation".

[17] In September 2018, The Atlantic reported that Greer had written pieces under the pseudonym "Michael McGregor" in the white supremacist publication Radix Journal in 2014[18] and 2015.

[98] Greer had later deleted parts of his Facebook page, but is seen photographed with white nationalists such as Spencer, Tim Dionisopoulos, the Wolves of Vinland, and also appears wearing clothes belonging to the group Youth for Western Civilization.

[17] Prior to June 2017,[100][18] The Daily Caller had published freelance articles by Jason Kessler,[98] a white supremacist who organized the Unite the Right rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

[103][104] The Daily Caller deleted all of Kessler's articles from its website in August 2017 after the Unite the Right rally, which he had organized with Spencer and others, turned into deadly violence.

[18] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported in 2017 that The Daily Caller had a "white nationalist problem", citing contributions by Kessler, Brimelow, Greer, and Ilana Mercer, whose writing on supposed racially motivated crime in South Africa was also published on the white nationalist website American Renaissance the same day it appeared in The Daily Caller.

[107] Contributors to The Daily Caller have included economist Larry Kudlow, Congressman Mark Sanford, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former US Senate Candidate and Judge Jeanine Pirro, sculptor Robert Mihaly, diplomat Alan Keyes, political commentator Ann Coulter, and the NRA-ILA.

[115] Content has also been contributed to the site by Lanny Davis, a former special counsel under Bill Clinton, and by political blogger Mickey Kaus,[1] who quit in 2015.