WaPo Loses 'Fact Checker' Glenn Kessler. Now Who Will Give 'Pinocchios' To True Statements?
There's been a huge talent drain at the Post lately. Also, Glenn Kessler left.
We have to admit we missed it when Glenn Kessler announced last week that he had accepted a buyout offer from the Washington Post. His final “Fact Checker” column last Thursday (archive link) lamented that these days, the falsehoods are winning and truth is in big trouble. The big social media sites have abandoned fact-checking, with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg making a big show of it in an attempt to impress Donald Trump. (Zuck complained that fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and actually promoted censorship, the monsters.) And no matter how much Trump’s lies are pointed out, he keeps on spewing them, and his supporters believe the lies or don’t especially care. Heck, the column ran just the day before Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a jobs report Trump didn’t like.
This week, Kessler wrote on Substack about why he left the Washington Post, in a piece titled “Why I left the Washington Post.” He painted a depressing picture of things at the formerly great paper, where owner Jeff Bezos and publisher Will Lewis have been so awful that lots of respected journalists and columnists have hung up their bylines. Kessler tells of a 2024 meeting he’d set up with Lewis to pitch bringing back the Post’s ombudsman — good on him — a position eliminated in 2013 after billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the paper. Instead of talking about that at all, Lewis had a more important question: “What should The Post do to appeal more to Fox News viewers?”
Well yeah, that is depressing.
It turns out that Kessler was especially keen on wanting an ombudsman after his 2022 column complaining that too many people, including Joe Biden, were giving too much credence to the story about the pregnant ten-year-old rape victim who lived in Ohio but had to travel to Indiana for an abortion, shortly after the Supreme Court eliminated Roe v. Wade. He was unhappy that the story was accepted as truth even though it had only a single source, Indianapolis OB-GYN Caitlin Bernard, who performed the procedure, and her claim hadn’t been independently verified. While the Right was still having a field day attacking the story and insisting it was fake (and citing Kessler’s story), news broke that a 27-year-old man had in fact been arrested and charged with the crime, and Kessler dutifully updated his fact check, he explains. But the Post’s PR team would only issue a brief statement, instead of the fuller explanation Kessler thought was needed.
If an ombudsman still existed at The Post, I thought, we could have explained the rationale for writing the story. Most journalists who read the article understood my point about being cautious, but many readers (especially women) were furious. I also thought it would be appropriate to publicly apologize to the child and the doctor who conducted the abortion. Instead, the newspaper acted defensive and uncooperative. I felt muzzled.
Well good for Kessler again. Wonkette approves of apologizing when you get shit wrong! In Kessler’s meeting with Lewis, the then-new publisher studiously ignored the topic of reviving the ombudsman.
It’s also a really typical Glenn Kessler story: All he wants is the highest ethics in journalism, and a single-source story that wasn’t yet verified needed to be taken with a grain of salt, is all he was saying. His intentions were pure, but all you libs got mad just because he helped ignite a rightwing frenzy of attacks against Dr. Bernard, who was both the first-person source and on-the-record.
In addition to Kessler’s fact check, Bernard was being condemned — not by him! — as a dirty liar whose account couldn’t be trusted, because she was an abortionist, and they always lie. Even after a suspect was arrested, Bernard was still attacked in rightwing media for allegedly “failing” to report the crime, although of course she properly reported it. Indiana AG Todd Rokita (R) made a big show of launching an investigation, telling Fox News that Bernard was merely an “abortion activist acting as a doctor” who needed to have her medical license revoked if she had lied. When Rokita went after her on national wingnut television, Bernard’s reports were already filed with the appropriate state agencies, where journalists were able to obtain copies. Even then, Rokita still pursued Bernard, filing a civil lawsuit claiming Bernard had violated her patient’s privacy by telling the Indianapolis Star about the case, although Bernard never identified the girl. After two years, Rokita finally dropped the suit.
Poor misunderstood Glenn Kessler.
His Substack post does offer some interesting inside glimpses of the chaos at the Post, where the bosses don’t seem to understand that trying to remake the paper in Fox News’s image won’t just drive away its generally liberal readership, but also won’t attract enough rightwing readers to keep it afloat.
In a parting shot, Kessler rips the Post’s management for not giving him an extra few months to select and train a successor to take over the Fact Checker title and its Pinocchio ratings. It doesn’t seem all that important to the Powers that Be.
That’s a shame, but it’s also a shame that Kessler’s approach to fact-checking was frequently so weird, in what always looked to us like a self-imposed attempt at “balance.” Republicans came in for scolding when they told outrageous lies, and Democrats came in for angry scolding when they said things that were true, but not true the way Kessler thought they should be true. There was the time Kessler insisted that Bernie Sanders wasn’t really truthful during the 2019 campaign, when Sanders, citing a 2017 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, said, “Three people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America.”
Kessler acknowledged the math worked out, and that in fact, the three zillionaires — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet (no not Elon Musk yet) — had actually gotten much richer between the 2017 debate and the 2019 Dem debate. But he said it’s a “question of comparing apples to oranges” because zillionaires actually have wealth and assets, while poors don’t:
But people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth, as debts cancel out whatever assets they might have. So the comparison is not especially meaningful.
Add all that nothing together and the lower half of Americans still have no wealth, and zero isn’t “wealth,” so there you go, it’s meaningless to even talk about wealth inequality. Turns out that the rich really are different from you and me, and are in a stratospheric category where one must not even compare them to the poor.
Kessler pulled similar tricks, giving “three Pinocchios” to Sanders for a true statement about the rate of medical bankruptcies because Kessler didn’t care for the methods used by the researchers, one of whom made a point of saying Sanders correctly characterized the research. He also nitpicked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for saying a “vast majority” of Americans don’t make a living wage, because it’s hard to define a “living wage” precisely, and because one set of stats AOC used came from a WaPo article saying that 43 percent of American households “don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone.” It wasn’t the sole evidence AOC used, but boy he sure got her, didn’t he?
Anyway, we are really all busted up about how now Glenn Kessler is able to retire comfortably with his buyout, which he notes just about makes up for what he lost when Bezos took over the Post and froze its pension plan. Lucky Ducky!
[Glenn Kessler on Substack / CJR / subhed gleefully stolen from Gary Legum on Bluesky]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time donation, here is your button.
>>There's been a huge talent drain at the Post lately. Also, Glenn Kessler left.<<
Epic.
Biden was obviously lying about seeing gay people cause they weren't flaming.