Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print!
We’re waving goodbye to another legacy member of the mainstream media this week.
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FOUR PINOCCHIOS
Longtime Washington Post fact checker and inventor of the “Pinocchio” system Glenn Kessler is leaving D.C.’s flagship paper after nearly three decades.
Kessler, who worked at the Post for 27 years and ran the fact-checking section for 15, announced his departure in a post on LinkedIn (ew).
“Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss,” Kessler said, noting that he was taking a buyout and planned to write books. “My fact checks were routinely the most-read articles on The Post’s website. I had my detractors, from both the left and right, but many readers appreciated my efforts to sort out the truth in political rhetoric.”
You can count me as one of those “detractors.”
I was a regular reader of WaPo’s fact-check section, particularly when I first worked at the Daily Caller as a media reporter. It quickly became apparent that there was a different rating system for Republicans and Democrats. You can see the disparity in this recent fact check on the Big, Beautiful Bill, where Trump’s misstatements are labeled “false” while misstatements by the Democrats are merely “exaggerations.”
Since the start of the year, Kessler has published 55 fact checks. Just four of those — including the aforementioned OBBB fact check — focus on anything other than claims by Republicans or the Trump administration.
The most obvious example of Kessler’s bias, though, was his treatment of Trump’s presidency versus Biden’s. WaPo’s fact-check page had an entire database dedicated to “Trump’s lies.” When Biden took office in January 2021, Kessler presented a final tally of “Trump’s lies” but neglected to start a separate database for Biden. He instead waited a full week after Biden’s inauguration to present a single fact check about the new president, which actually required an “update” after Kessler got the original figures wrong. He wouldn’t award Biden another Pinocchio rating until the following month.
Toward the end of Biden’s presidency, Kessler went all in on the White House’s “cheap fakes” narrative surrounding videos of Biden appearing dazed and confused and falsely stated that Biden would have needed action from Congress to meaningfully secure the border (which Kessler later admitted was wrong).
My biggest gripe with the WaPo fact-checker, however, was probably the aforementioned Trump database. I provided my own analysis of those numbers for the Caller in 2019 and found that Kessler had massively inflated “Trump’s lies.” A review of just four days of Trump statements that Kessler labeled “false” exposed miscounting in the hundreds. Trump was building the border wall, the Russia investigation was a hoax, there were 5.5 million jobs added to the economy since the November 2016 election. Kessler also took issue with, among other statements, Trump citing a Rasmussen poll and claiming that Obamacare was a “disaster.”
Instead of counting each of these claims as one “false statement,” Kessler would add up the number of times Trump said each one in order to push the total number of “lies” higher. Across just seven claims that I identified as either “true” or “unsubstantiated,” Kessler had smacked Trump with 554 “falsehoods.”
Kessler indicated that WaPo did not have a plan to replace him at the fact-checking desk. That would be a welcome change for D.C.’s rag.
WHAT ELSE IS ON MY RADAR
Fact check this, Glenn:
Trump Calls London Mayor A ‘Nasty Person’ Right To Keir Starmer’s Face
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A new group of rich, white liberals is really mad they might have to pay a living wage to get their oysters shucked…
Wealthy Residents Of Maine Resort Town Fret Over Losing Access To Cheap Illegal Labor
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An excellent op-ed from Judicial Watch’s Chris Nelson on the Colorado attorney general suing a cop for cooperating with federal immigration enforcement:
NELSON: Democrat AG Puts Cops In The Crosshairs, Sues Deputy For Doing His Job
