Washington Post “Fact-Checker” Glenn Kessler announced on July 28 he’s hanging up his Pinocchios and accepting a generous buyout after 27 years.
“Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss,” he announced.
Kessler used a Pinocchio scale for his fact checks, and “Four Pinocchios” was his version of a “Pants on Fire” lie. During the 2016 campaign, Kessler reported, “[Donald] Trump earned significantly more four-Pinocchio ratings than [Hillary] Clinton—59 to 7 … the numbers don’t lie.”
The numbers tilted left. Kessler’s white whale was Trump. In 2020, he and his team authored a book titled “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.”
The Post constructed a database of Trump claims. At the end of the first term, Kessler celebrated their end-of-term count of President Trump’s “false and misleading statements”—30,573. Liberals routinely mangled this count by suggesting it was 30,000 “lies.”
They built that number by counting repeated “lies.” For example, Trump would say, “African American unemployment is at the best number in the history of our country.” That was ruled false because it was overstated: The Labor Department has only measured this rate since 1972. That was counted as false 79 times.
Their most repeated “lie” (at 225 times) was Trump claiming, “Russian ‘collusion’ was just an excuse by the Democrats for having lost the election.”
Kessler didn’t move a muscle in 2018 when Barack Obama bragged in Boston that “we didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us” when he was president. That’s a whopper, but Kessler did not want to return to the scene of Benghazi, or the “Fast & Furious” gunrunning scandal, or the IRS smothering tea party groups.
Then, because they are a Democratic Party paper, the Post announced when Biden was inaugurated, it did “not have plans to launch a Biden database at this time.”
Kessler went on MSNBC and announced, “The Biden presidency will be a lot like the Obama presidency, and that they will be responsive, and will be able to quickly back up what they’re saying.”
This matched what Kessler told Jordan Klepper on Comedy Central in 2016: “In terms of fact-checking, Hillary Clinton is like playing chess with a real pro. Fact-checking Donald Trump is like playing checkers with someone that’s not very good at it. It’s pretty boring. … His facts are so easily disproven, there’s no joy in the hunt.”
Look at his “Fact Checker” page now, and all those “Four Pinocchios” ratings are on the Republicans — Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Sen. Tim Scott and House Speaker Mike Johnson. At the 100-days mark, Kessler penned a piece titled “One hundred days of Trump 2.0: Falsehood after falsehood, again and again.”
In 2025, NewsBusters analyst Alex Christy counted 105 Washington Post “fact checks” for conservatives and Republicans to 4 for liberals and Democrats (one was shared by Sean Duffy and Eric Swalwell). In 2024, the ratio was 143 to 24.
In May, the New York Post editorial board wrote, “If there was such a thing as shame anymore, the Washington Post’s pompous ‘Fact Checker’ column would close up shop.” Because they embarrassed themselves by dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop and attacking Republicans for “cheapfake” videos of President Joe Biden wandering off in Europe just days before Biden’s debate debacle. Kessler’s still defending his errors as factually defensible.
Kessler should get a gold watch or some kind of retirement prize from the Democrats for his dedicated service to using the “Fact Checker” page to undermine Trump and the Republicans.
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