Her Back Pages: Kaitlan Collins’ Work as Reporter for a Right Wing Website
By Amanda Coopersmith, June 22, 2023
Reporter Kaitlan Collins was tapped by (now-former) CEO Chris Licht in May to fill CNN’s primetime 9 p.m. anchor slot which has sat empty since Chris Cuomo’s 2021 departure. Collins drew national attention in May for her notable performance as moderator in CNN’s contentious Trump Town Hall, where despite being steamrolled by the former president, she managed to doggedly fact-check his firehose of misinformation, ultimately earning a “nasty person” callout from Trump himself. Her show is slated for a June 2023 launch according to a CNN article posted May 17. However a CNN spokesperson told TheRighting this week that no official start date has been announced.
Prior to becoming a CNN White House correspondent in 2017 and reporting enemy #1 in the early days of the Trump administration, Collins worked for a very different media organization: Collins spent the first three years of her career at Tucker Carlson and conservative pundit Neil Patel’s Daily Caller. Patel bought out Carlson’s share of the publication in 2020.
TheRighting looked back at Collins’ work at the Daily Caller, where she started as an entertainment reporter before working her way up to serve as the publication’s White House Correspondent.
The Entertainment Beat
As a young entertainment reporter fresh out of University of Alabama, Collins’ early reporting could be described as “sexy clickbait” with frequent use of the phrases “hot babes” and “smoking hot babes.” Collins leaned into the clickbait-friendly formula, reporting a plethora of short entertainment releases, award shows, and brand partnerships with headlines promising titillating photos and videos, like Gisele Bundchen’s (two-second) “cleavage enhancing wetsuit” in her coverage of Gisele’s Chanel No. 5 film, and Selena Gomez’ cleavage at the opening of her indie movie “Rudderless.”
A little conservative outrage over “nearly naked” celebs never hurts, and Collins managed to poke fun at women’s wardrobes across Hollywood with titles like “Silly Victoria’s Secret Model Forgets that National Sideboob Day Already Happened” and “Isn’t it a Little Cold to Wear a Bikini Emily Ratajkowski?”
Ratajkowski remained a crowd favorite throughout Collins’ three-year tenure, seemingly warranting a new story any time she posted a photo in anything less than a T-shirt. “The quality of Emily Ratajkowski’s childcare skills is unconfirmed, but it’s pretty clear she is one hot babysitter,” Collins reported after EmRata posted a photo babysitting in a “Teeny Bikini.” She called the baby “very lucky.”
Collins, who has a B.A. in Political Science, took some early cheap shots at female Democratic leaders. In 2014, she cheekily reported that Hillary Clinton was Old as Dirt (a slideshow of countries that had been founded since Clinton was born) and offered a “DIY How to Glare Like Michelle Obama.” Since then, Collins has fully embraced the iconic white pantsuit.
As her reporting continued, Collins received meatier assignments, covering Robin Williams’ suicide, the Cosby rape allegations, and Joan Rivers’ death, primarily through secondary reporting of other outlets’ coverage. She continued regularly reporting on fluffy filler topics including celebs spending too much money, wardrobe malfunctions, Sports Illustrated models, and the Kardashian clan.
LGBTQ+ Issues
When Caitlyn Jenner came out in 2015, Collins reported on her transition. While Collins did use the name Caitlyn in her reporting following Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover story, she continued to use he/him pronouns for Jenner well into 2016, including in a report that Jenner was now allowed to use the women’s locker room at her golf course in March. (When asked for comment about the pronoun usage, CNN referred TheRighting to the Daily Caller, which declined commenting about the Jenner story.)
It seems that Collins might have reported those stories differently today. In a 2018 moment of hypocrisy, Breitbart reported on anti-gay tweets Collins had allegedly posted while in college.
She responded on Twitter saying, “When I was in college, I used ignorant language in a few tweets to my friends. It was immature but it doesn’t represent the way I feel at all. I regret it and apologize.”
Vanishing Bylines
In 2021, The New York Post reported on allegedly “scrubbed” articles from Collins’ time at the Daily Caller. According to their reporting, at least five stories had removed her name and replaced it with simply “contributor.” At least two of the reported stories, “13 Syrian Refugees We’d Take Immediately” (hot girl list) and “Are the Obama Girls’ Skirts Too Short” had her byline attached at the time of reporting.
Her 2014 “Ice Bucket Challenge Hipsters: These Guantanamo Detainees Did It First,” which covers the number of times different political prisoners were waterboarded, seems to be permanently removed from the Daily Caller’s website, though it is documented in the internet archives.
Political Shift
In 2016, Collins began shifting towards politics through her coverage of celebrity statements surrounding the upcoming elections. Articles include comments by celebs on both sides of the aisle, including Spike Lee, Lindsay Lohan, Ice Cube, Simon Cowell, JK Rowling, and Will Smith. Over the course of 2016, more of her coverage shifted political, with a few entertainment pieces and scandalous celebs thrown in.
Collins wrote her last list “Six of the World’s Most Stunning Female Politicians” in October 2016 before officially becoming the Daily Caller’s White House correspondent in 2017. Her political reporting from this period is fairly straightforward, with short articles centered around specific statements made by White House officials, sentiment polls, and secondary reporting of breaking news. She also wrote regular press briefings that condense statements about contentious issues under digestible sections like “On Ivanka Getting an Office in the West Wing” and “On why Jared Kushner is in Iraq.”
Despite the Daily Caller’s right-wing political leanings, Collins’ commitment to fact-checking then-president Trump appears in her early political coverage. In an article titled “Trump Criticizes ‘Pathetic’ London Mayor After Quoting Him Out of Context,” Collins makes it clear that Trump “mischaracterized what Khan said” and provides the full statement. The Trump Town Hall may have felt like deja-vu for Collins: she first reported on Trump’s “unsubstantiated claim” of election fraud at the Caller in 2017.
According to reporting by Forbes, Collins’ sharp questions at White House briefings and dedication “caught the eye of CNN” and she was invited to speak on the network several times. After Collins met the network’s president Jeff Zucker at a White House Correspondent’s event, CNN began recruiting Collins in earnest.
Collins was hired by CNN in July of 2017. Thanks to her relentless questioning even in the face of a near freeze-out by the Trump administration, she was promoted to Chief White House Correspondent in 2021.
Amanda Coopersmith is a Stanford-techie-turned-journalist who writes at the intersections of tech, gender, LGBTQ+ issues, and politics. She is a Master’s student in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU Journalism. @acoopersmith4
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Early in her career at the Daily Caller, Collins (above) took some cheap shots at female Democratic leaders reporting cheekily that Hillary Clinton was “old as dirt” and offering advice on “how to glare like Michelle Obama.”
