Andrew Stiles is the Washington Free Beacon’s humorist, but he extends himself beyond his usual beat to take account of the exit of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler from the paper. What a piece of work is Kessler. John touched on Kessler’s greatest hits here yesterday. Stiles offers a somewhat more “inclusive” compilation in “RIP Democracy: Glenn Kessler, Bravest Fact-Checker in Journalism History, Exits WaPo After Taking Buyout.” Subhead: “The truth will never be the same.” Here is Stiles’s greatest hits compilation (links omitted):
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• Biden “cheap fakes” — Days before the infamous debate in June 2024, Kessler denounced the “deceptive framing” of video clips of Joe Biden behaving like a senile old man. The cheap fake videos were “misleading,” he concluded, citing a 2009 interview in which Biden said he doesn’t dance, as well as a statement from Andrew Bates, the discredited former White House press aide, who accused Republicans of using misinformation to distract from Biden’s historic accomplishments. Kessler was hardly alone in promoting the absurd White House spin. A senior Biden aide told reporter Alex Thompson after the election that they “could not believe we got those stories placed,” referring to articles such as Kessler’s that advanced the “cheap fake” narrative.
• The “lab leak” conspiracy — In May 2020, Kessler posted a video from his fact-checking colleagues at the Post, which he claimed was proof that COVID-19 did not leak from a lab in Wuhan. Months earlier, a Post article accused Republicans who entertained the possibility of a lab leak of promoting a “debunked conspiracy theory.” When Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) accused him of promoting Chinese propaganda, Kessler scolded the GOP lawmaker for failing to appreciate the “scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus [to] jump from the lab.” Most experts now agree that COVID-19 almost certainly did leak from a Chinese lab.
• Tim Scott’s racial privilege — In April 2021, Kessler humiliated Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), the first black senator to represent a southern state since Reconstruction, by exposing the truth about his allegedly humble family origins. Kessler, with the help of two university professors who just happened to be Democratic donors, published an extensive investigation into Scott’s lineage to “fact check” the senator’s claim that his grandfather was illiterate and dropped out of school to pick cotton during the Great Depression. For example, Scott claimed his grandfather dropped out of school in the third grade, but Kessler uncovered evidence suggesting he may have actually dropped out in the fourth grade. He also accused Scott, who was raised by a single mother in poverty, of downplaying the “success” of his relatives, who apparently owned farm land and lived in a house worth $10,000 in today’s dollars.
• The “brilliant and talented” Taylor Lorenz — In June 2022, shortly after Taylor Lorenz joined the Washington Post, Kessler pushed back on right-wing falsehoods by praising Lorenz as a “brilliant and talented” journalist who was a “terrific addition” to the paper’s staff. He also posted a selfie with Lorenz; they were both wearing masks for some reason. Since “voluntarily” leaving the Post in 2024, Lorenz has showcased her brilliance and talent by gushing about Luigi Mangione, the madman who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, describing the killer as a “morally good man, which is hard to find.”
• Putting the “fun” in “Soros-funded” — Kessler pounced and seized in April 2023 after Donald Trump accused Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels “hush money” case, of being “funded” by liberal billionaire George Soros. The fact-checker awarded three Pinocchios to this claim, arguing that Soros never gave money to Bragg “directly,” he had merely funneled $1 million through a left-wing nonprofit, Color of Change, just days after the group announced it was funding a large ad campaign on Bragg’s behalf. “While that appears like careful coordination, both Soros and Color of Change say the two events are unrelated,” Kessler wrote with remarkable credulity. He also accused Republicans of dabbling in anti-Semitism for criticizing Soros.
• The Trump dossier — Kessler repeatedly promoted the so-called Steele dossier, which included salacious claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. Even the New York Times admits that the dossier’s claims have been “discredited.”
• Exposing the Free Beacon‘s “lies” — Kessler has routinely scolded our disreputable publication for tainting the national discourse with misinformation. In 2022, he dismissed our report on the Biden administration funding the distribution of crack pipes to advance “racial equity.” The administration claimed this wasn’t true, and Kessler demonstrated his knack for “speaking truth to power” by taking them at their word. (Fact check: They were lying.) That same year, Kessler trashed us again when we reported that the Biden administration was releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and selling it to China. The fact-checker conceded that our report was accurate, but had “been turned into something nefarious” by others making “suggestions” that the Biden administration had done something wrong, as opposed to “following the rules.”
Read the whole thing here.
