The Media Research Center has always hated fact-checkers because they keep showing how much right-wingers (and Donald Trump in particular) lie. So when Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler announced he was leaving the paper, the MRC couldn’t have been more thrilled. Tim Graham — who has his own issues with the fact that fact-checkers exist — was eager to kick him out the door in his July 30 column whining that Kessler fact-checked Trump:
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 “Trump earned significantly more four-Pinocchio ratings than Clinton – 59 to 7….the numbers don’t lie.”
The numbers always demonstrated a partisan pattern. Kessler’s white whale was Donald 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.”
Rather than dispute the accuracy of any Kessler fact-check of Trump, Graham played whataboutism:
Kessler didn’t move a muscle in 2018 when Barack Obama bragged in Boston “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” gun-running scandal, or the IRS smothering Tea Party groups.
Then because they are a Democrat Party [sic] paper, the Post announced when Biden was inaugurated, it did “not have plans to launch a Biden database at this time.”
Graham returned to whining that Republicans were fact-checked:
Look at his “Fact Checker” page now, and all those “Four Pinocchios” ratings are on the Republicans — Trump, J.D. 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. In 2024, the ratio was 143 to 24.
Again, Graham did not dispute the accuracy of any of those fact-checks, nor did he demonstrate that Democrats require the same level of fact-checks that Republicans do.
He concluded by huffing: “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.” Yes, Graham thinks fact-checking Republicans is a sinister plot to “undermine” them. He does not raise the possibility that Repubicans should simply stop lying.
Alex Christy used a July 31 post to cheer that Kessler is sad about the state of fact-checking:
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler departed the paper on Thursday in a gloomy mood as he penned his final column lamenting the state of the industry and repeating several sanctimonious falsehoods about the business.
Kessler began his lamentations by marveling that “somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world.”
[…]The guy who went to bat for Hamas’s casualty reports despite admitting they make no difference between civilian and combatant deaths should probably refrain from claiming he is the personification of the truth. Kessler has also suggested that viewing George Soros and his donations to left-wing causes as the driving force behind certain things, such as Trump’s New York indictment, could be anti-Semitic despite admitting the left did something similar for years with the Koch Brothers.
Christy didn’t mention that his employer has, in fact, invoked anti-Semitic stereotypes in attacking Soros. He was further aggrieved that right-wingers (like, say, his employer) have turned fact-checking into a partisan battleground:
However, Kessler then returned to Trump and eventually mourned, “the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship.”
Kessler then tried to claim that he really is the definition of the truth, “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.”
They would say that because it is true. For example, for many years, something the fact-checkers loved to go after Republicans on was the size of the Navy. It’s a wonky policy debate that, to oversimplify, is between more ships and better ships. However, the fact-checkers, including Kessler, would, without fail, come down against GOP calls for more ships as if a preference could be false. They were able to do this because the experts they chose to talk to were on the other side of the debate.
But Christy cited no “experts” who backed up Trump. He then whined further that his beloved Trump was fact-checked:
Of course, no talk of Glenn Kessler can be complete without the memory that, “The Fact Checker team documented that [Trump] made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims.”
While other media people have mistranslated that as “more than 30,000 lies,” it should be noted that some of these alleged mistruths include things like “Then there was ultimately proven there was no collusion. No — after two years, no collusion.”
Kessler also accused Trump of hypocritically attacking him while also citing him, “Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost twenty times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California).”
That was six years ago.
[…]In 2024, when there was a Democratic president, Republicans still outpaced Democrats 143-24, which means if a Democrat messed up, it must have been so bad that Kessler couldn’t ignore it.
Nobody has ever claimed that everything a Republican says is true, but the disparity cannot be disputed. What can be disputed are certain allegations of falsehood, which is something that happened a lot during Kessler’s time at the Post, but thankfully that is all over now.
Like Graham, Christy doesn’t prove that Democrats lie at the same rate Republicans do.
Graham returned to whine some more in an Aug. 4 post, citing his subordinate Christy in the process:
One way that you know Washington Post“Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler was a liberal anti-Trump warrior is how National Public Radio was so sad to see him leave the paper. On Thursday’s All Things Considered, no one considered a counterpoint, that Kessler was extremely biased in his target selection.
Our Alex Christy just pointed out that Kessler’s ratio this year was 105 checks “correcting” Republicans, and just four for Democrats. The Post created a database of 30,000 “false and misleading claims” for Trump, and then announced they would do no such counting thing for Biden.
Again, Graham failed to demonstrate that Democrats lie equally as much as Republicans. He then launched a weird personal attack on Kessler:
Kessler wanted to have power, that presidents and presidential candidates would wither at his gaze, and genuflect at his rulings. Kelly wasn’t going to ask about where his facts or his bias was challenged, like how he “evolved” on the theory that Covid emerged from a Chinese lab leak, or how Hunter Biden’s laptop exposed real corrupt dealings with foreign businessmen.
As if Graham doesn’t want to have power by acting as a subservient shill for Trump and Republicans, or that he himself can’t brook criticism of his rampant right-wing bias. He concluded with one more huff:
When liberals start complaining about “the rise of social media,” part of that complaint is that Democrat scandals or Republican arguments about Democrat failures can gain traction, and the liberal media doesn’t like losing control of the “public conversation.” Counterpoints and contrary narratives should not be considered.
Says the guy who bans counterpoints and contrary narratives from the website he manages. What a hypocrite. He further sneered in his podcast that day that Kessler “has some kind of socialist Senioritis on his Fact Checker stats. When it came to awarding Pinocchios in 2025, the ratio was 105 to 4.”