Accuracy & Ethics

The Daily Wire is committed to providing our readers truthful, accurate and ethical reporting. We take multiple steps to verify claims in our reports and differentiate between confirmed facts, credible claims and speculation. The claims in our articles are fact-checked by authors and reviewed by editors and internal fact-checkers. We prioritize drawing directly from primary sources and clearly credit other news sources when their work informs our own. We provide readers multiple ways to contact us about any issues or questions about our reports and seek to address problems as quickly as possible, providing clear notation for significant revisions (see Corrections Policy).

Along with news reports, The Daily Wire publishes commentary, analysis and satire, among other types of stories. We designate story categories above headlines, among them: News, News & Commentary (news reports with some commentary or analysis by the author), Opinion, Analysis, Satire, Interview, and Review (categories updated Jan. 2021). Our site also hosts several podcast series that feature political and cultural commentary.

In the interest of truthful, transparent reporting, commentary and analysis, our podcast hosts, opinion writers and editorial staff are forthright about their ideological and political perspectives.

The Daily Wire requires the editorial staff to maintain the highest journalistic ethics and standards, including disclosing conflicts of interest, refusing any payments from outside sources for stories and properly protecting confidential or proprietary information.

The Daily Wire protects the identity of those who choose to write under a pen name. An individual who writes under a pseudonym is fully accountable for the content produced under that name.

Corrections Policy

The Daily Wire provides wide-ranging coverage of the relevant news of the day, and while our editorial staff endeavors to provide our readers with accurate and clearly expressed reporting, errors inevitably occur. When we do make mistakes, we address them honestly and transparently in a manner that is appropriate for the type and degree of error.

Corrections, Clarifications, Updates, & Retractions: For objectively false information, we provide corrections in clear notations in the text of the article, and in headlines when appropriate, and amend the article to provide readers accurate information. If we find it necessary to clarify phrasing significant to the story, we will note the clarification and specify what has been clarified. We also note significant updates to stories in clear notations in the text of the article, and in headlines when appropriate. In the rare case that a story poses ethical problems or contains errors significant enough that the story merits removal, we will provide an editor’s note explaining the decision to retract the piece.

In the case that an opinion piece published by The Daily Wire is found to contain an objectively false claim, we provide notations with clarifying information and give authors a chance to offer corrections or clarifications.

Social Media: We additionally address significant corrections, clarifications, updates and retractions on our social media platforms.

Sources & Attribution

As part of our commitment to truthful and transparent reporting, The Daily Wire seeks to give appropriate credit to all of our sources, including other news outlets and individuals. We follow standard journalistic practices on direct quotation and paraphrasing and do not permit any form of deliberate plagiarism of other sources. When we have drawn information or ideas from a source, we cite and/or link to the source. When we are given information from individuals or entities, we follow standard journalistic practices for attribution regarding on-the-record, off-the-record, and on-background information. We seek to establish with sources the nature of the information they are providing prior to interviews. We privilege named sources over unnamed sources. For those sources who will only speak on condition of anonymity, we protect their names and provide an accurate description of them without risking disclosing their identity. In all cases, we seek to confirm sources’ accounts to the highest degree possible before publication.

The Daily Wire’s Policy on Withholding the Identities of Mass Shooters

Following the tragic mass shooting on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro announced that The Daily Wire will no longer publish any names or photographs of mass shooters or other mass killers. In the instance that an individual’s name is published inadvertently, we work to address the error quickly. When suspects are still at large, The Daily Wire might publish details about suspects, including names and images, if doing so can aid the efforts of law enforcement. The following is a revised excerpt from Shapiro’s explanation of The Daily Wire’s policy effective Feb. 19, 2018:

This decision comes after another horrific shooting, this time in Parkland, Florida. One of the jobs of those of us in the media is to weigh the public’s right to know about news events against the impact our coverage can have on the lives of Americans. It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the value of public knowledge regarding specific names and photographs of mass shooters is significantly outweighed by the possibility of encouraging more mass shootings. Studies suggest that media coverage of mass shootings can have a significant impact on the psyches of potential mass shooters — that such potential mass shooters have a cognitive craving for attention, which they know they will receive for committing atrocities.

As Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2016, “media contagion” can help make mass shootings more common. “Unfortunately,” said Johnston, “we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.” The rise of such a trait in mass shooters, she claimed, rose “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hours news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” Johnston recommended a media pact to “no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers,” predicting that if the media did so, “we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years.” While other studies do not make such a dramatic statistic prediction, they do support similar conclusions.

We at The Daily Wire would like to do our part. We will still report the backgrounds of mass shooters, biographical details, the type of weapons used in such shootings, how such weapons were obtained, and other details that could make a difference in the public debate with regard to policymaking. But we will not contribute to the unintentional glorification of shooters themselves by giving their names and faces airtime. Instead, we will continue to focus on the victims of such awful attacks, and the heroes who all too often must give of themselves to stop them.