James Taranto is the Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor. Yesterday the Journal published his own column on the exit fact-checker Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post: “The Fact Checker Checks Out” (behind the Journal’s paywall). In the word of another Journal editorial page feature, it is at lest Notable and Quotable. Here is Taranto’s conclusion, addressing Kessler’s defense of the inclusion of his column on the Post’s news pages:
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So thorough was Mr. Kessler’s self-deception that he literally didn’t know what he was doing. True enough, “facts aren’t opinions.” His columns contained facts, but so does good opinion journalism. Mr. Kessler fails to see what is in front of his nose—that his assignment of “Pinocchios” isn’t a fact but a pure opinion, crudely and childishly expressed.
In his Post swan song, five days before his Substack premiere, Mr. Kessler acknowledged and dismissed this line of criticism: “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.”
Yes, “some” might say that, and Mr. Kessler’s nodding to the point shows a flicker of self-awareness. At the same time, he manages to invent a new logical fallacy—the appeal to groupthink, or argumentum ad consensum pecoris. One might also describe it as an appeal to empty authority.
In emphasizing this uniformity, Mr. Kessler acknowledges something else: that the product he was selling under that “marquee brand” was indistinguishable from that of his competitors. His defense against accusations of subjectivity and bias is that his work was unoriginal. If he was right when he advised [Washington Post publisher Will] Lewis that the Post needs “exclusive, compelling articles”—and I think he was—then Mr. Kessler’s superiors were right to herd him out the door.
