Fact Checking in an Era of Bullshit

Glenn Kessler has taken a voluntary buyout from the Washington Post. In his last column, “The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning.” he takes stock of the state of play of his longtime vocation.

In reviewing many of the some 3,000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for president.

“Businessman Donald Trump is a fact-checker’s dream … and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his announcement speech. How little did I realize that would be true. Trump decreed that mainstream news organizations were “the enemy of the people,” undermining faith in traditional reporting, and insisted to his followers that he was the best source of information.

This will surprise few readers. It’s a topic we’ve covered for a decade now, often referencing Jeet Heer‘s December 2015 observation, “Donald Trump Is Not a Liar, He’s something worse: a bullshit artist.” To take two examples, see my July 2018 post “Buried in Trump’s Bullshit” or Michael Bailey’s June 2025 post “Seeing Double on Doubling Down.”

The phenomenon has been with us so long that it’s a bit hard to remember how stark the break was.

Before Trump entered politics, I found that many politicians spun or dissembled but most tried to keep their claims tethered to the truth. Our fact checks covered a range of topics, such as the accuracy of government statistics on students dying from alcohol or exaggerated claims about sex trafficking, which led lawmakers to stop using them.

President Barack Obama told the occasional whopper — “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan” — but it was the rare politician, such as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota), who constantly spouted Pinocchio-laden nonsense. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, also had a reputation for mangling the truth: In 2011, Biden touted an Obama-era jobs bill by claiming the number of rapes in Flint, Michigan, had — depending on the hour of the day — doubled, tripled or even quadrupled because the number of police had been reduced. There was no evidence to support any of his statistics.

But Bachmann and Biden were outliers. In the 2012 presidential campaign between Obama and Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, the two candidates were neck-and-neck in their average Pinocchio rating. Indeed, they had the lowest average number of Pinocchios of the major 2012 presidential candidates.

They also took fact checks seriously. Both candidates dropped talking points after a negative fact-check rating. An Obama administration official explained to me how, when faced with a choice of figures, the administration took the more modest number in hopes of avoiding Pinocchios. I heard from a campaign source that during debate prep, Obama, to his great annoyance, was told he couldn’t use a statistic because it had gotten Pinocchios. Obama’s campaign manager even sent a lengthy letter to The Post’s editor complaining that my Pinocchio ratings were undermining his attacks on Romney’s business record.

While Kessler’s overall point—that, despite conventional wisdom, most prominent politicians were reasonably honest—is true, part of the frustration Obama and others have had with Kessler and other fact checkers is their tendency to distinguish. broken promises from lies. To take the “whopper” Kessler begins with, President Obama’s 2009 pledge, “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period,” there’s just no evidence in the fact check that Obama was lying. While it may have been foolish to make a promise he couldn’t keep, I have no reason to think he didn’t mean it. And I voted for his opponent in both instances and opposed the bill.

Still, I do think the industry helped keep politicians honest. Until it didn’t.

The expectation that politicians would stick close to the truth began to erode with Trump’s emergence. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the 9/11 attacks — and doubled down even after my fact check proved this was a fantasy. He invented statistics — that the unemployment rate, then pegged at 4.9 percent, was really 42 percent — and kept repeating them, no matter how many times he was fact-checked.

In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible).

But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.

It’s the political equivalent of Gresham’s Law: if bad behavior is rewarded, good behavior becomes less common.

Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter — where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 — and other social media to spread his message. Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most talked about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data.

Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump — and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content — tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation.

In fairness, the Facebook model in particular had a left-leaning tilt. This was particularly true during the COVID pandemic, where now-debunked theories were considered the objective truth. And, again, I write that as someone who operated on the prevailing assumptions promoted by Anthony Fauci and other public health experts.

Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers — The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95 percent of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way.

During Trump’s first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios — the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term.

That’s an understandable decision. The fact checks clearly didn’t matter. Trump supporters either didn’t care whether the statements were true or dismissed the evidence against them as biased. And, frankly, once you get past 30,000, what’s one more?

Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost twenty times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California).

During the 2024 campaign, Trump sometimes mentioned Pinocchios, such as in a campaign stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, in October. “I have to be very careful when I talk because the fake news, if I say something wrong, a little wrong, if I’m 3 percent off … they’ll give me Pinocchios,” he told a rally. “You know the Pinocchio? The Washington Post, they give you Pinocchios. If you say something perfectly, they give you a Pinocchio.”

But since Trump took office for a second time in January, he hasn’t mentioned Pinocchios again. In an era where false claims are the norm, it’s much easier to ignore the fact-checkers.

Indeed. Especially once they stop fact-checking.