Washington Post ‘fact checker’ throws in the towel
Last Thursday, Glenn Kessler, the official “fact checker” columnist for The Washington Post since 2011 and a Post employee for 27 years, stepped down in an employee buyout.
Mr. Kessler is best known for the “Pinocchios” he awarded for what he rated as falsehoods, with four being the worst score. He gave it to President Donald Trump over and over.
Republicans always got the lion’s share of Mr. Kessler’s Pinocchios, with a Democrat occasionally thrown in to demonstrate a semblance of objectivity.
For 2025 so far, NewsBusters analyst Alex Christy has counted “105 Washington Post ‘fact checks’ for conservatives and Republicans to 4 for liberals and Democrats (one was shared by Sean Duffy and Eric Swalwell). In 2024, the ratio was 143 to 24.”
Whenever Mr. Kessler gave a Democrat some Pinocchios, he would make up for it by savaging Republicans for days on end.
You can just imagine what he heard at liberal cocktail parties whenever he dared to call out a lie by Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. The Left is not exactly known for being forgiving.
Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, recently provided an overview in The Daily Signal of how Mr. Kessler went about his business, especially when it came to Mr. Trump, whose propensity for exaggeration is well known.
For example, “Trump would say, ‘African American unemployment is at the best number in the history of our country.’ That was ruled false because it was overstated: The Labor Department has only measured this rate since 1972,” Mr. Graham noted. “That was counted as false 79 times.”
Mr. Kessler also had it in for people who favored the reasonable theory that COVID-19 leaked from the communist Chinese military’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In May 2020, after Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, poked holes in a video presentation aimed at convincing people that the virus was transmitted from bats to humans, Mr. Kessler posted this on X:
“I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus to jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.”
In fact, the communist Chinese and their Western enablers cooked up any number of excuses to steer people away from what was obvious, and the “fact checkers” bought into it.
In February 2020, a group of 27 scientists published a statement in the Lancet. It should be cited as evidence in any forthcoming trial over pandemic culpability.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement declares. “[We] overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”
It was drafted by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which used U.S. government grants to fund gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, ridiculed the lab theory and was handled with kid gloves by Mr. Kessler and other liberal watchdogs.
Factcheck.org, part of the left-leaning Annenberg Public Policy Center, posted “Correcting Misinformation About Dr. Fauci” on Aug. 23, 2022.
While the piece clarifies some overwrought claims, it includes this: “Many scientists suspect the virus ‘spilled over’ into humans from an animal. There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci, for some reason, snagged a presidential pardon via Mr. Biden’s autopen.
One of the very first fact-checking sites, Snopes.org, founded in 1994, has long engaged in liberal bias. One way they do this is to rate a conservative claim as only “partly true” or “partly false” if they find a technical flaw, casting doubt on the overall truth of a statement.
Another way is to ignore content that might hurt Democrats.
During the last 2020 presidential debate, Mr. Biden said the New York Post’s factual story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Russian plan” and a “bunch of garbage” that “nobody believes.”
On April 6, 2021, Snopes reviewed the laptop controversy, noting that “the Biden family remained mostly silent on the laptop controversy during and after the 2020 election.”
“Mostly silent” apparently includes issuing flat-out lies during a nationally televised forum.
Sometimes, the “fact checkers” cover for each other.
“In 2012, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes’ responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama and found them free from bias in all cases,” according to mediabiasfactcheck.com. Really?
About the best I can say about any of the liberal fact checkers is that they are right sometimes, like the blind pig that can turn up a truffle now and then.
And on those rare occasions when they pick on a Democrat, we get to say things like, “Even Snopes says [insert Democrat] made it up,” or “even FactCheck.org admits that [insert Democrat] lied through her teeth.”
We just won’t be able to say, “Even Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler says [insert Democrat] misled the public.”
I think I can live with that.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.