The Media Research Center wasn’t done whining about fact-checker Glenn Kessler upon his departure from the Washington Post. Alex Christy spent an Aug. 7 post complaining that Kessler pointed out the Post’s emerging right-wing tilt:
After departing The Washington Post, fact-checker Glenn Kessler did what seemingly every major journalist who has recently left a major outlet has done: he joined Substack. On Tuesday, Kessler took to his new platform to claim that he left the Post because publisher Will Lewis wanted to expand the paper’s audience to include Fox News watchers.
Even before Kessler began his article, the subheadline was a bit pretentious, ‘“Democracy Dies in Darkness’ — but what if the lights are going out from within?”
[…]According to Kessler, the problem is that Fox viewers already read his articles. Just as in his farewell article at the Post, he claimed hypocrisy was afoot. “I certainly knew when Fox News viewers read my fact checks — if I gave Pinocchios to Democrats. Whenever I did, right-wing news organizations would rush to post articles saying I had determined Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi was a liar.”
The problem is that Kessler thinks this is proof of his impartiality and proves his critics, such as this website, wrong. However, the more accurate take would be to say that if Kessler takes a break from his heavily disproportionate focus on President Trump and Republicans to go after a Democrat, then whatever the Democrat said must have been really bad. Kessler’s Pinocchio count from 2024-2025 was 148-28 against Republicans.
Christy didn’t explain why the president of the United States shouldn’t face “disproportionate focus” for his words — or why it’s apparently bad to fact-check a Republican at all. He further whined:
Finally, Kessler declared, “Working at The Post feels like being on the Titanic after it struck an iceberg — drifting aimlessly as it sank, with not enough lifeboats for everyone. The Carpathia (i.e., Bezos) appears too far away and too distracted to help. And the captain is shouting commands that the solution is a different ship.”
If Kessler wants to use the Titanic analogy, let’s take it further. The iceberg is the paper’s liberal bias. The current ownership is trying to do damage control, but the evasive maneuvers may be too little, too late.
Will Christy also agree that right-wing bias is the “iceberg” that will sink outlets like Fox News? Unlikely.
Tim Graham tried to relitigate a right-wing failure in an Aug. 10 post:
Isaac Schorr at Mediaite reports former ABC News political director Mark Halperin interviewed Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler after his final “fact check.” At one point, Halperin honed in on one of Kessler’s most controversial recent checks, going after the New York Post for overplaying Joe Biden meandering off to talk to a parachutist.
The GOP version of the video cut out the parachutist — but the meandering was still obvious. (The parachutist clearly wasn’t looking at the president, so was it a conversation?) The Post headline said the video was “deeply misleading.”
Kessler now referred to Biden “supposedly wandering off” — but you can watch the Italian prime minister wander after him like she’d been briefed he needed a minder.
Graham even admits the GOP video misled viewers by cutting out a crucial part of it, but he still insist it wasn’t misleading at all — something he and the MRC have long insisted despite the evidence — and insists Kessler was the one who looked bad:
Kessler still refused to acknowledge his “cheapfake” critique looked bad in retrospect: “We were looking specifically at that video and letting, and we showed the full context of the video you showed he was talking to-, and I recently reviewed that column because I got subject of a nasty editorial in The New York Post. I feel, you may think I’m crazy and your viewers may think I’m crazy, but I think in the context in which I wrote that, that column still stands up even though we now know that Joe Biden had issues.”
Graham whined further about it in his Aug. 11 podcast, huffing that Kessler “refuses to admit error on Biden ‘cheapfake’ videos showing his mental decline.” Graham, of course, refuses to admit those partisan videos were, in fact, misleading.
Christy returned to complain further about Kessler in an Aug. 15 post:
Former Washington Post colleagues Glenn Kessler and Jen Rubin reunited on August 4 on Rubin’s The Contrarian podcast to discuss Kessler’s departure from the Post’s Fact Checker page. During their conversation, Kessler would unleash three headscratchers: that he fact-checked Republicans more because they are in power, a historically incorrect warning about going back to the 19th century media model, and the claim that Democrats are the party disadvantaged by the current media landscape.
Rubin echoed the idea that Republicans are fact-checked more because they deserve it, “And when you say politicians, we’re really talking about a sea change in the Republican Party. Democrat politicians are not always truthful, they exaggerate. Joe Biden had a few of these things that he just kept repeating over and over again, but really the sea change has been on the Republican side, hasn’t it?”
Kessler agreed, “Yeah, I would say that’s generally correct.”
Rather than offer any evidence that Democrats lie at least as much as Republicans do, Christy grumbled:
That makes no sense on two levels. First, even when there was divided government in 2024, Kessler handed out 143 Pinocchios to Republicans and only 24 to Democrats. Second, Democrats may be out of power, but they want to regain power, so what they say matters.
After a digression in which Christy tried to absolve the role of “yellow journalism” in pushing for U.S. involvement in what became the Spanish-American War, Christy grumbled about Kessler some more:
For his part, Kessler rolled on, “The big problem I see right now is that everyone is in their own silos. It used to be you would get the newspaper, and… the news itself was generally pretty straight, but, and it forced you to look at, you know, everything, you know, everyone sat around and listened to Walter Cronkite at night or Huntley Brinkley, and there was like a common base of news.”
According to Kessler, this hurts Democrats because, unlike Republicans, they don’t have a media that will defend whatever their guy does[.]
Christy not only didn’t dispute this characterization, he failed to admit that he’s part of a siloed right-wing media dedicated to defending everything Donald Trump does.