Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Last week Glenn Kessler, the longtime writer of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, announced that he had accepted a buyout, joining dozens of his former colleagues in walking away from the storied institution. Kessler was prolific during his twenty-seven years at the Post, writing more than three thousand fact-checks, by his own count, and helping spearhead an entirely new genre of journalism. He has, perhaps inevitably, launched a Substack, where he promises to deliver a mix of “fact-based analysis” of politics and samples of his fiction writing.

He departs at a time when the media’s ability to challenge falsehoods uttered by those in power has never been weaker. (A spokesman for the Post declined to share any information about what would happen with Kessler’s column.) This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

JR: How does it feel to be leaving the Post after so long?

GK: The Post has been my life for almost three decades. It’s obviously kind of a strange feeling. The last week was a bit of an out-of-body experience because it was like reading my own obituaries. I plan to keep writing, I just won’t do it in a newsroom.

I think the thing that I’m going to miss most is, obviously, being in a newsroom. I just like the camaraderie and interaction you have there, and being there when there are big news events. That’s what’s gonna be hard to adjust to.

In your final column, you said that you believe “falsehoods are winning.” Why do you think that is?

I attribute it to the rise of Donald Trump, combined with the rise of social media. Trump has made it acceptable to lie with impunity. He creates his own reality, his own world, composed of alternative facts. And his followers fall right in line, and their news organizations echo all of that. 

For example, recently there was a bad economic report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is completely nonpartisan. It’s a survey of employers, and employers fill it out.… It’s a baseline number that people have come to respect. And Trump just now fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because he accused the head of manipulating the statistics. So he’s now casting down on the work of thousands of people that go out there and ask these questions of employers, because he didn’t like the number.

That’s living in your own alternative reality. Presidents, for decades, have never questioned the numbers produced by the government workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I mean, there were bad numbers—they said, “Okay, we’ve got to work harder.” And Trump is just going to say, “No, the numbers are great. It’s just that these people are manipulating them.” That’s a very dangerous situation for this country to be in.

In your final piece, you wrote, “In an era where false claims are the norm, it’s much easier to ignore the fact-checkers.” Do you feel like fact-checking is dying? 

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s dying. It definitely is a rough patch after years of incredible growth, and we’re all at the mercy of tech billionaires these days.

At the Washington Post, the newspaper is going through some turmoil because the owner, a tech billionaire, has decided he wants to change some things. In the broader world of fact-checking, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta spent a hundred million dollars to support a hundred fact-checking organizations around the world. That kind of money, of course, is gonna bring lots of growth. But then, in order to curry favor from Trump—who doesn’t like fact-checks and doesn’t like the idea that social media platforms are actually rooting out false information—Zuckerberg decided to stop the funding for fact-checkers in the United States, and is probably going to roll it back across the world, [though that may be] more difficult because other countries have higher standards for social media platforms.

What was the hardest fact-check call that you ever had to make?

There’s one that took a couple months of work. It had to do with an Israeli accusation that the Palestinian Authority paid 350 million dollars a year to the families of terrorists. And so I investigated that. A lot of it depends on the definition of “terrorist.” It is clear that the Palestinian Authority does provide what they call martyr payments, which is money to sustain the families of people who were killed—from the Palestinian perspective, as part of the struggle against the state of Israel; from the Israeli perspective, some of these people had blood on their hands. The definitions get really fuzzy. Say the Israelis throw into prison some teenage kid who was throwing rocks: Is that person necessarily a terrorist?

So the difficult part was to convince the PLO to open their books up to me to show me how much they were paying. It’s very complex, but in the end I determined the figure was not 350 million, but more like 100 million dollars. I don’t make a judgment whether or not 100 million dollars is a lot.… It’s up to the readers to decide.

I ended up giving two Pinocchios to Benjamin Netanyahu, which resulted in an official Israeli complaint to the State Department. They did not like the Pinocchios.

I’ve always wondered about the Pinocchios. Were they designed as a way to call out powerful people in a less pointed way?

You mean not saying, “This is a lie”?

Yes.

I generally avoided using the word “lie” because I think it’s a conversation-stopper.

I was quoted in the New York Times as saying that Marty Baron, the executive editor, had basically said, “We can’t use the word ‘lie.’” After that appeared, Marty came to me and said, “I never said we were against the word ‘lie.’ It just has to be the right moment. You have to just really be sure of yourself.”

In what way do you think it’s a conversation-stopper?

Because it focuses less on what the person is saying and more on the fact that I am saying that person is a liar. To say something is a lie really starts to dip into the area of opinion, which is what we’ve strived to avoid at the Fact Checker.

So in the case of an incident where I said, “This is a lie,” it had to do with the payments to Trump’s paramour Stormy Daniels, where he said he knew nothing about that. And then Michael Cohen released tapes of Trump actually talking about the payments. Then Marty came to me and said, “Okay, you can write that story and say ‘This is a lie.’” 

Regardless of their original purpose, it seems like some people did not like getting them. 

Most people don’t realize this, but I always had a standard where if a politician admitted an error, I would not award Pinocchios. I would still write the fact-check, but as long as they said, “Oh, I messed up,” there’d be no Pinocchios.

With Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign—he was running against Trump, the guy who received so many Pinocchios—and they were really determined to avoid Pinocchios. And Biden had gone around saying that he had opposed the Iraq War from the start, which was wrong. He was on record voting for the Iraq War. I called [his team] up and said, “Well, this is clearly four Pinocchios.” Then Biden went on a radio show saying, “I’ve said that, I was wrong, I shouldn’t have said that.”

And there was another instance—I’m not going to name the politician, but there was another instance of a politician who is extremely high in Congress, who went on TV and said something wrong about a program that they were supposed to be an expert on. So, clearly it was four Pinocchios. And I called up and said: “Look, you just admit you’re wrong and I won’t award the Pinocchios.” And the answer I got back was “Well, thanks for the offer. I’d rather take the Pinocchios than admit I was wrong.”

I really want to ask you who that was.

We’re talking about one of the most powerful people in the government.

That’s amazing. How do you feel about the end of your time at the Post? The paper is clearly going through a lot of change—is it good?

Because of the buyout there was this artificial deadline of July 31, and I really wanted to get an agreement where I had stayed over for a period of time so we could identify a successor and I could have an appropriate handoff of the franchise that I had built, and we weren’t able to reach the agreement of a period of time.

I think that the unfortunate thing is that the impression it left was that maybe the Washington Post is not committed to the Fact Checker. It seemed like it would have been a slam dunk for them to say, “Yes, we need you to stay on so we can have an appropriate transition, so we don’t leave that questioning.” But instead, you know, so many things seem to be driven by financial considerations as opposed to journalistic considerations.

I was quite annoyed about the way my tenure at the Post ended, because I expected and hoped that there would be an actual passing of the baton, like a relay race. For many people around the world it was considered a model. This whole thing about the Bureau of Labor Statistics—that was ripe for a fact-check.

I just think it’s a pretty perilous period to not have someone full-time running the Fact Checker. 

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.