"So what’s next for The Fact Checker? I’m not sure. As many people at The Post know, I tried to arrange a short-term contract that would have given the editors time to find a worthy successor and allow me to train him or her. I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history. But we couldn’t work out an agreement."
Kessler tells us he plans to write books and in fact, he's already written a novel. It's "about a love triangle set in 1920s Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), based on State Department cables I found in the National Archives."
Posts
60 comments:
Washington DC is a one company town (government), and the Post is the company paper. Their "fact checker" was notoriously biased in favor of the company and quite frequently just plain wrong. May his poor reputation factor in his future efforts.
Facts depend on framing. You could say that they're actually equal, and studying the rhetorical movements of one with the other is responsible for deconstruction. If you do it on systems you like, you wind up with insights.
Sign me up. He’s been writing excellent fiction for years.
The hole they have dug for themselves is so deep, there's no hope of digging themselves out by admitting what they've been up to all this time. They can't comment on the revelations because that will open the door on their complicity. So all they can do is pretend it doesn't exist. Thumbs in ears, 'La La La La, I can't hear you..... '
103. The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakeable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe.--Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.
114. (``Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'', 4.5): ``The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.''--That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through we look at it.
Wittgenstein
I tried to arrange a short-term contract that would have given the editors time to find a worthy successor and allow me to train him or her. I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history. But we couldn’t work out an agreement."
I tried to get WaPo to hire someone as corrupt and dishonest as I am, but for some reason they weren't interested.
FIFY, Glenn
"But we couldn’t work out an agreement."
Has this dim bulb considered the implications of his situation? They paid him handsomely to go away. So one of two things is true (Fact!). Either WaPo desires a very long gap in its fact-checking coverage, or else WaPo wants a fact-checker untainted by the stench of Glenn Kessler. Either way, they want him gone enough to pay him to go.
He's a pecker
He's a wrecker
He's the WaPoop fact checker
Democracy not in the sun
Sir Loin said...
Sign me up. He’s been writing excellent fiction for years.
I disagree. It's been boring, stupid, pedestrian, and utterly predictable (GOP bad, Dems good) for all 15 years.
I can’t find his novel (maybe not published yet) but his book
Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies(2020) Is #175,308 in Books, in the 300,000’s on kindle.
Meanwhile The Achievements of Kamala Harris(2024) - which consists of blank pages is #21,277 in Books.
Handmade tales.
Matt Taibbi's awesome takedown of this faker is subscriber-only so I'll have to make do posting this link to Instapundit that has some of Kessler's low-lights as collected by Greg Price.
WaPo does not need a fact checker any more than CBS needs a Late Show.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the post linked above for another greatest hit(piece) by Kessler on Mitt Romney as described by John Nolte.
LOL. good riddance - liar.
Greg The Class Traitor said...
Sir Loin said...
Sign me up. He’s been writing excellent fiction for years.
I disagree. It's been boring, stupid, pedestrian, and utterly predictable (GOP bad, Dems good) for all 15 years.
My bad. “Excrement fiction”
Glenn Kessler was not a fact checker. He was a propagandist. We discussed his unwillingness to correct Obama's almost daily dinners with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn for eight years, since documented by credible sources. He called me a cunt and hung up.
So. Would a few weeks training his successor make him or her a better liar or would it just make them much better liars?
Thank you, Christopher B. That was a stellar piece by Taibbi.
Whatever. All “fact checkers” are, in reality, opinion checkers or narrative checkers. And what is “fraught” about this particular time? Self-importance seems to be a bigger part of the job than any actual allegiance to objectivity.
Leftists will probably call this an attack on free speech by the Trump administration.
That Glenn Kessler was a fact checker is a claim without evidence.
If Joseph Goebbels and Ann Selzer had a child together, it would be Glenn Kessler.
Yancey Ward said...
Pravda always has fact checkers comrade.
Kessler was one of the justification points that the giant social media companies used in their collusion with our government to destroy the first amendment and persecute their political opponents.
Glenn Kessler was a fascist piece of shit. He knew what he was doing. The Oligarchs made him rich in doing so.
If there is going to be a free republic Kessler's public execution would be a lesson for 6th graders for a generation. If there are no real consequences for being part of the fascist system and you get rich trying to help the Oligarchs eliminate the first amendment then there will always be attempts like this.
He “want to train them”! That’s a joke. No wonder they didn’t want to keep him on.
The Times they are a-changing.
The Post too.
His work came with the open disclaimer on the WaPo website that the fact checker was editorial. Problem was they never treated it like it was, so most other places didn’t either, including this one…
…it was vile propaganda work that isn’t working anymore, so now that the back door/side door propaganda cash flows from US Treas are drying up, well…buyout sounds better than shit-caned…
I tried to arrange a short-term contract that would have given the editors time to find a worthy successor and allow me to train him or her.
Fact check - He wanted to get several more paychecks before he left. And the WaPo editors said "adios". And no one needs to be "trained" to fact check. And he was not worthy of having a "successor". LOL.
I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history. But we couldn’t work out an agreement."
Factcheck - he was upset Trump and Republicans might go a while without being attacked and lied about. But WaPo editors just wanted him gone. ASAP.
this fraught period in U.S. history
Ain't it always? (Or is it not-fraught when a Dem is in charge?)
Ran out of lies?
What the hell? It's too hard to find a "fact checker?' Someone to look into the "facts" and say whether a given proposition of "fact" is true or not? Any reasonably competent research associate can do that.
Spin doctors, on the other hand, are more specialized, and harder to replace.
"After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout,"
2 weeks severance pay?
I rate his announcement 4 Pinocchio’s. It doesn’t matter what was said and how valid it may be. I’m simply being consistent to his scoring method and awarding them based on who it is.
"Fact checker" my fat fanny! I won't miss you at all.
Leftist "Fact checkers" - aka lying propogandists for their lying lairs who lie masters.
I imagine they will struggle on without him. Perhaps they could use Grok for free?
His family ran Shell Oil back in Holland. He wrote a "fact check" attacking Tim Scott for claiming a rags to riches rise when Scott's great grandfather had owned a lot of land a century ago. "Fact checking" is just a continuation of political warfare by other means.
I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history.
He ought to be writing comedy. Maybe Colbert will give him a job.
Here are the headlines for Kessler’s last two fact checks:
“Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘seditious conspiracy’ claim is based on thin gruel” July 22, 2025
“Trump and Epstein had a relationship, but there’s no evidence of Trump wrongdoing” July 17, 2025
An epistolary romantic novel (think Les Liasons Dangereuses) in the form of 1930s State Department cables would be creative, if thats what he's thinking. It would take quite an imagination to make it work.
Another American job that can be better done by AI.
Don’t let the door, etc.
“ Trump and Epstein had a relationship, but there’s no evidence of Trump wrongdoing” July 17, 2025”
That got him fired.
So aother partisan hack bails. Good news i guess but I seriously doubt whoever the WaPo replaces Kessler with will be any better than he was and more likely they'll be a DEI hire working for less salary. To WaPo management that's a twofer.
He's a clown. Fraught with bullshit
Lots of societies try to create institutions that are bastions of unquestionable integrity. The Romans had the vestal virgins. Corrupted. The UN, the World Court, the CDC, and the list goes on and on, all corrupted. Fact checkers are yet another failed attempt to transcend human nature, with its flaws of subjectivity., bias, laziness greed, and self deception. Not even Althouse is immune Only I am immune.
Hey Ampersand.. Humans are political animals Aristotle noted in his book of the same name. It's in our very DNA. And as LBJ once told a sincere do-gooder freshmen senator, "you can't reform the politics out of politics", no matter what you try. We all have feet of clay. Except you & me.
I doubt State Department cables dealt with personal romantic troubles, but if so, that could be a reason why Japan took everyone else by surprise in 1941.
*
One of the problems with living in a cynical age is that we tend to assume that everyone in the past was as corrupt as people are now. Were they? Is it just human nature? Or was there some innocent golden age in the past? Maybe the thing about the press was that it was most honest in its cynicism and least honest when it cultivated pious illusions about itself.
"I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history. But we couldn’t work out an agreement."
There's a guy who's good at working deals, he's been in the news a lot lately. Maybe you could have asked him for help.
"So what’s next for The Fact Checker?"
Now he's free to fact-check the Washington Post. Nothing stopping him from doing that. Or fact-checking any other media organization making up news today.
Would probably make for interesting reading.
Alas, this guy doesn't fact-check. He writes narratives for the Democrats and they have plenty of those already.
Goodbye, pathological liar.
A chancroid blister in the Sun…
Ha, Iman. You're on fire lately.
"Kessler tells us he plans to write books and in fact, he's already written a novel."
makes sense.. after all every thing he wrote for the WaPoo was fiction
I tried to arrange a short-term contract that would have given the editors time to find a worthy successor and allow me to train him or her.
Conventional training methods shouldn't be an issue, as there are plenty of unsold paper copies of WaPo to place on the floor.
Worthy successor.
Glenn, how can we miss you when you won't go away?
What they really need is a hack-checker.
Fact checkers? We should have those in the courtroom. Then we wouldn't need everybody else.
And here I thought that, once upon a time, fact checkers were used internally, so that if you wrote an article for NYT, someone would check it before publication, and point out that, no, Nixon was not impeached, thus saving you and the paper from embarrassment.
The sheer arrogance of this biasboy to think he would be kept and his judgement believed of "a worthy successor" and that he would be needed to "train" the replacement.
GK: Just remember and repeat after me: "Orange Man Bad", "White People Bad", "Guns Bad", -- are you listening??
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.