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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 “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.”
