Carl "The Dig" Allison Diggler is a fictional American journalist. Introduced in 2015, the character was created by Blake Zeff and mostly written by Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas for CAFE, an online publisher of political news and satire, in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential election.

Diggler, a middle-aged, centrist pundit who prides himself on his "inside the Beltway" knowledge of the Washington, D.C. political scene, is the purported author of a column published at CAFE and a keen, if clueless, Twitter user. Portrayed as a smug, ignorant blowhard, the character hero-worships the bombast and theatre of American politics with little concern for its consequences. His writing frequently exposes details of his failed marriage and protracted family court proceedings for custody of his son Colby. Texas described the target of the character as "ridiculous" pundits. During 2016 Diggler also hosted The DigCast, a podcast featuring weekly guests, with Biederman giving voice to Diggler and Texas playing Diggler's millennial intern. Biederman also established the Chapo Trap House podcast in 2016, which Texas has co-hosted.

Writing as Diggler, Biederman and Texas began using their intuition to guess the outcomes of primary contests in the election. By the end of the primary season, Diggler claimed to have correctly predicted more winners than data journalist Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog. Texas ran an op-ed in The Washington Post about their predictive success and the ways Diggler exposed the flaws of supposedly objective data-journalistic techniques.

Cafe editor-in-chief Blake Zeff came up with the original idea for Carl Diggler, and hired Biederman and Texas to develop the character and write his columns. Biederman was then a freelance writer on various topics, and Texas was a former contributor to The Onion; both were popular Twitter personalities. Zeff contributed ideas, edits the columns, and helped to run Carl Diggler's in-character Twitter account, but the articles and social media posts by the character were largely the work of Biederman and Texas.

In addition to tweeting in-character as Diggler, Biederman and Texas typically wrote one to four Diggler columns a week. Splitsider writer Eddie Brawley said Texas has "the more polished, literary style" and a skill for tonal imitation of writers like Hunter S. Thompson when the occasion calls, while Biederman possesses a "preternatural ability to observe and exploit the tiny absurdities of online behavior."

Biederman and Texas had semi-fictional counterparts under their own names as Diggler's interns. They occasionally broke the fourth wall in the column to write articles as themselves when they were, in real life, on-location covering political events on the 2016 campaign trail—under the fictional pretext that Diggler, meanwhile, is stuck moping back in his Park Slope apartment.

Diggler is a satirical parody of the American political pundit class. Diggler has worked in national political journalism for thirty years, starting as chief political editor at the Minnetonka Bugle, and is the author of the book Think-ocracy: The Rise Of The Brainy Congressman. Most Diggler articles begin with a credo reminding readers that Diggler uses "gut, conventional wisdom and personal experience" when analyzing politics. Texas offered this summation of Diggler's persona and satiric purpose:

Carl exists to satirize all that is vacuous, elitist and ridiculous about the media class. From his sycophantic love of candidates in uniform to his hatred of Bernie Bros, from his reverence for "the discourse" to his constant threats of suing the people who troll him on Twitter, Carl is predicated on being myopic, vain and — frankly — wrong.