Former Washington Post writer: COVID lab leak fact-check is an ‘infinite regret’ 

Glenn Kessler, who worked as a fact-checking columnist at The Washington Post for 28 years, has left that job and wrote an article titled “Why I left the Washington Post.” He joined Ira Stoll, founder of theeditors.com, to talk about his long career at the Post, what he got wrong and the changes he believes news outlets should make to their coverage to appeal to more readers or viewers.

In his article, Kessler said he was on a mission to “reinstate the ombudsman” at the Post, which didn’t work out in his favor.

An ombudsman is not part of the regular editorial staff and is usually independent. It’s someone who acts as a mediator between the news organization and its audience, usually providing unbiased assessments of the outlet’s performance.

Newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times used to employ ombudsmen. However, the positions have been phased out over the years.

“I wrote an email to the executive editor and managing editor and made a pitch to bring back an ombudsman. My missive was ignored,” Kessler wrote in “Why I left the Washington Post.”

When speaking with Stoll, Kessler said an ombudsman could help explain to readers why certain stories are selected, why stories are written the way they are and to help admit when mistakes are made in articles.

A skeptical fact-check and a missed opportunity

Kessler recalled the time he wrote an article, a “skeptical perception,” on a 10-year-old girl crossing state lines to receive an abortion just two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“And, originally, this story was picked up by the right-leaning media as an example of this was a falsehood. And then this story was confirmed that it actually did happen. I updated my fact-check,” Kessler recalled. “But I got a lot of negative blowback from readers for having done this in the first place. And I felt if there were an ombudsman in place, they could have laid it out, explained how the story got written, why it got written, how it was edited, the mistakes that were made.”

Revisiting the lab leak theory

There was also discussion about whether fact-checkers were too quick to dismiss the “lab leak” theory about where the COVID-19 virus came from and whether they wrongly labeled it as false before enough evidence was available.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the “lab leak theory” — the idea that COVID-19 might have accidentally leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — was widely dismissed by many fact-checkers and those seen as experts on the matter.

As time passed, some scientists and investigators said the theory could not be ruled out and deserved more serious consideration, raising concerns that some fact-checkers may have declared it false too soon.

While at the Post, Kessler edited a piece titled “Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful.”

Kessler added the “It’s doubtful” part to the article. He said that the original fact-checks about the origins of the coronavirus were mainly aimed at debunking the idea that it was deliberately engineered as a biological weapon. Looking back, he calls this “an infinite regret.”

“One of the reporters on the piece came up to me the next day and said, ‘I think you made a real mistake by putting ‘it’s doubtful’ here. Because I’m uncertain where it stands, and you framed it in a way that made it seem more definitive than what we came up with,” Kessler said. “That’s on me. I screwed up. She recently left The Washington Post to go to another place. In my goodbye remarks, I mentioned: This explains why you should always listen to Sarah, because she’s right, and I was completely wrong about this.”

Then, in 2021, Kessler wrote a different piece for the Post titled “Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible.”

Kessler wasn’t alone in quickly dismissing the lab leak theory. Comedy Central host Jon Stewart garnered headlines for going against the grain in 2021 when he appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” In a segment seen more than 8.5 million times on YouTube, Colbert appears surprised when Stewart told him the thought of a virus that matched the description of a facility in Wuhan being the source of the pandemic wasn’t so far-fetched.

“The disease is the same name as the lab,” Stewart said. “That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?”

Navigating bias in the media landscape

Kessler and Stoll also talked about left-leaning versus right-leaning coverage and the difference between news and editorial. He encourages people in today’s media environment to diversify their news feeds.

“I personally learn more from people I disagree with than people I agree with,” Kessler said.