One Of The Most Toxic Trends In Journalism Is Dying Off – Mark Hemingway

So I should say a word, then, about how I met Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler. Kessler recently took a buyout from his employer, and the end of his reign as one of America’s most influential “fact checkers” is a cause for general celebration, even if I say this with some personal affection for Glenn himself.

In December of 2011, after years of sublimating my annoyance, I gathered my thoughts about media “fact checkers” and published a cover story in The Weekly Standard, “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking.’” The article made something of a splash. Post-Trump, it’s difficult to remember how influential media “fact checkers” — no, I will not stop using scare quotes — had become. In the early Obama years they had amassed such authority that GOP politicians used to have to regularly drop everything and respond whenever they were accused of spreading falsehoods by a “fact checking” organization. I say it was a problem for GOP politicians, because among the many problems with “fact checkers” is that they are obviously partisan, and this could be easily proven. One of the things I reported in the above article was a University of Minnesota study that tallied up the conclusions that “fact checking” organizations reached and found they accused Republicans of lying three times more often than Democrats.

I had also mentioned Kessler in that article, because he was fresh off a controversy recounted in that article that didn’t make him look very good. Kessler thought that a Politico report that Biden had called Tea Party supporters “terrorists” was worth a “fact check,” and he concluded the report was “dubious,” because, well, Obama had denied it weeks after the fact or some other absurdities. That, in turn, prompted an irate response from Ben Smith, who was then a reporter at Politico. He maintained they had confirmed Biden’s statement with five people in the room, and gave Biden the opportunity to deny the statement before publication, and he did not. In Kessler’s defense, who could possibly imagine Joe Biden going off script and insulting Republican voters?

I suppose I was already on his radar, when less than two months later, still on the anti-“fact checker” warpath, I read something of his that was so poorly done I could scarcely believe it made it into print. Before joining The Weekly Standard, I’d spent a few years covering union politics, and Kessler had written a related “fact check” so egregiously wrong in every particular that I could scarcely believe it. I hate to employ overused hyperbolic internet-centric adjectives, but this resulted in a column, “Fact Checking Failure in Five Easy Steps,” where I DESTROYED Kessler’s “fact check.”

Anyway, I don’t think I’m overstating that my takedown was definitive, because I got a nice note from Glenn, who then linked my response to the bottom of his column. Considering the tone and substance of what I wrote, voluntarily directing readers to what I had written might have been worse than a retraction. It immediately made me think well of Kessler — had the tables been turned, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have acknowledged a confrontational rebuke so bluntly.

That carried on over the years, when I continued to critique him publicly, and in any number of private emails and DMs. When pressed, Kessler would make concessions; I don’t think it was a secret that he came to resent the fact that the Post’s one to four “Pinocchio” ratings system, while a very effective marketing gimmick, made various ratings seem more solid and objective than they were. Of course, that “fact checkers” tried to make their judgments on complicated matters of rhetoric and policy sound definitive to the point of pseudoscientific objectivity was always absurd and one of my stated objections from the beginning, so it was hard to have much sympathy that he was continuing to participate in such a flawed system. But again, Glenn was always friendly and respectful. This is not universally true; and I went after “fact checkers” generally and Glenn specifically, hammer and tongs, for years. I’m pretty sure the PolitiFact people actually hated me for being an effective critic, or at least one of them confronted my wife at an event and it was somewhat awkward for her.

With Kessler, his ongoing judgment was often hard to defend, though I often did defend him, not just as a nice guy, but because I genuinely judged him to be the most reasonable “fact checker,” even if that was something of a backhanded compliment. Let it be said, he was hardly wrong about everything, and occasionally went hard after Democrats and the left, and could be quite thoughtful at times. However, on many issues, big and small, the Washington Post “fact checking” team was out in front, loudly and proudly being wrong.

Here he is decrying “cheapfake” videos suggesting that Biden has age related cognitive impairment. Here he is saying it’s “virtually impossible” COVID leaked from a lab. Here he is defending the veracity of the Steele dossier at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation. Just in the last week, Matt Taibbi took him to the woodshed for his laughable attempt to downplay the recent revelations of even more corruption in the Trump-Russia investigation. If you plug “Kessler” into X at the moment, you’ll get an endless stream of people grateful he’s leaving and guffawing at his questionable judgments.

But that’s exactly what Kessler did. The Washington Post started a Trump “lie-tracker,” which in and of itself would be a fine thing to hold a president accountable, I guess. In practice, I never imagined the results would be so transparently laughable as to discredit their entire enterprise once and for all.

By the end of Trump’s first term, the Washington Post “fact checking” team had an ongoing tracker claiming that Trump had made 30,573 “false or misleading claims,” or roughly 21 lies a day. Now surely Trump was on the hook for some of those, but by and large the Post’s “fact checking” standards for “false and misleading” were insane. Trump got dinged hundreds of times for, quite rightly, questioning the Russia collusion investigation with generic statements such as, “My job was made harder by phony witch hunts, by ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ nonsense.”

Time and again, Trump’s statements were judged with grossly unfair rhetorical sleights of hand. In the summer of 2020, Trump went on Fox News and said, “We need security, we can’t defund our police and we can’t abolish the police. They want to abolish our police.” According to the Post, that was a lie because then-presidential nominee Joe Biden said he was not in favor of defunding the police. But many Democrats were publicly in favor of defunding the police in 2020, and nothing about the transcript of Trump’s remarks suggested the plural “they” was referring to the singular Biden.

Some of the claims were just insulting. Eight different times, Trump was accused of lying for saying “We have tremendous African American support.” How exactly is someone who claims to deal in facts quantifying the adjective “tremendous,” which according to the dictionary can either mean “extreme size” or merely “a generalized term of approval?” Almost the entire database was the Post applying absurdly unfair standards to Trump that would never get fairly applied to any other public figure. (I wrote about the Post’s lie tracker in more detail here.)

The methodology of the lie-tracker and its absurd numbers did make one thing painfully clear: The purpose of the Post’s “fact checker” here was not truth or accountability. “Trump has told 20,000+ lies” was a talking point repeated ad nauseum in the 2020 election, even though any honest broker who looked at their Calvinball methodology for determining “false or misleading” would find it false and misleading. The truth is that the “fact checker” was lying about Trump lying to try and sway the outcome of an election. It’s entirely possible that Kessler and no one else at the Post saw what they were doing in such stark terms, but, I’m sorry, that’s not unfair. Especially when you consider that Kessler explicitly declined to do a similar tracker for Joe Biden after being called out. And Biden was a man who already had a well-documented history of truly egregious lies going back decades.

Well, Glenn Kessler accused Donald Trump of lying 30,000 times, making a ludicrous, half-assed attempt to document this claim, and where exactly did that get those of us that want a functioning media? Following Biden’s disastrous term when Kessler himself tried to falsely assert he was mentally competent to serve as president when he clearly was not, Kessler is now leaving the Washington Post, while Trump is back in the White House. Again, I won’t go so far as to make a definitive judgment, so you tell me who won the credibility battle between media “fact checkers” and Donald Trump.

While you puzzle that out, let me just say again that Glenn is a very nice guy. You’d be delighted to have him as a friend and neighbor. But on some level, I have to separate the personal and professional. Professionally, I have no trouble saying I’m glad that “fact checking” is dying off And personally, I’m grateful Glenn has the opportunity to finally do something, anything else.