Washington Post puts a lid on fact-checking
As President Donald Trump was getting his America First agenda rolling in February 2017, Washington Post so-called “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler created a “new interactive graphic” to track “every suspicious claim made by the president in his first 100 days in office.”
After Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, the Washington Post has put a lid on fact checking the White House.
Kessler tweeted on Monday that his team would continue to fact-check Biden “rigorously” but would no longer maintain the database started for Trump.
“Here’s the Biden database — which we do not plan to extend beyond 100 days,” Kessler said.
“Biden’s relatively limited number of falsehoods is a function, at least in part, of the fact that his public appearances consist mostly of prepared texts vetted by his staff,” Kessler proclaimed. “He devotes little time to social media, in contrast to his Twitter-obsessed predecessor, and rarely faces reporters or speaks off the cuff.”
The Post’s Fact Checker is known for its one-to-four Pinocchio scale.
Some conservatives noted that there aren’t enough Pinocchios on the scale to measure what the Post is doing.
“The Biden presidency is over. Rest easy,” tweeted media critic Stephen L. Miller. “Whew what an incredible 100 days presidency.”
Miller added: “I love how Kessler has to be begrudgingly pushed into doing the bare minimum that his job requires for five whole months.”
Others said the timing of Kessler’s move was conspicuous considering he had just been slammed for his “factcheck” of South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.
Ruthless podcast co-host Josh Holmes on Tuesday noted that Kessler’s report was “anything but a factcheck” and accused him of “trying to discredit” Scott over his family’s ancestry.
“He was so out of pocket — he was essentially in this article making the argument that Tim Scott’s Black family in the Deep South decades and decades and decades ago had it easy,” co-host Comfortably Smug said. “He was like, ‘Listen, Tim Scott talks about pulling himself up by the bootstraps, but his family had land during the Jim Crow South.’ That was his argument! Like, that was the fact-check!”
Co-host Michael Duncan gave Kessler “a little bit of credit” for fact-checking Biden’s false claims about Georgia’s election reform bill, which earned “Four Pinocchios”, but did a “heel turn” with the Tim Scott fact-check.
“All of these media companies have built their subscriber base exclusively off the left-wing hate of Donald Trump, right?” Holmes chimed in. “It’s the only reason they’re profitable and now that circulation is down 50 percent, that viewership on TV is down 50 percent for CNN, they’re taking huge dives.”