WaPo departure points to end of fake ‘fact checks’

Mark Hemingway of the Federalist ponders a welcome development in the world of journalism.

[Glenn] 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. …

… The Washington Post plans to continue “fact checking,” but to some extent Kessler’s departure is unavoidably a victory for sanity in politics. The first Trump presidency made it painfully obvious that “fact checking” did not exist as a fair and independent vocation, it was strictly an attempt to control the public debate. No doubt that Trump is a rhetorical tornado of hyperbole, half-truths, and self-serving rhetoric, but never in a million years did I imagine that a “fact checker” would try and one-up Trump by exercising their own brand of rhetorical absurdity.

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.

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